NEW DELHI: The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) House on Tuesday approved contracts worth around Rs 1,805 crore for mechanised road sweeping and litter collection, with the civic body set to deploy 70 mechanical road sweeping machines and 1,000 vacuum-based battery-operated litter pickers.
The two contracts are aimed at strengthening mechanised cleaning operations, with the sweeping machines to be deployed under a 10 year operation & maintenance contract and the litter pickers under an eight-year contract.
Under the mechanical road sweeping machines (MRSM) proposal, the civic body will deploy 70 machines under an operating expenditure model, under which the agency will be paid on a per-kilometre basis. Each machine will cover 40 km per day shift, for 312 days in a year. The contract has been awarded at a cost of Rs 923 crore for 10 years. Initially, the MCD received a bid of around Rs 1,080 crore but negotiated the amount down by Rs 165 crore before awarding the contract.
A official said that the payment mechanism also provides for penalties in case the prescribed road-cleaning targets are not met. At the same time, an additional payment will be made on an actual per-kilometre basis if the machines need to undertake additional rounds beyond the prescribed distance. This provision assumes significance during the implementation of the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP), when additional or extended shifts may be required.
The second contract covers 1,000 vacuum-based battery-operated litter picker machines and has been awarded at a cost of Rs 882 crore for eight years. Each litter picker will operate for an eight-hour daily shift, with payment linked to the prescribed shift-based operation. The deployment will strengthen litter collection and cleaning of roads and public spaces across MCD’s 250 wards.
The contracts represent an investment of Rs 1,805 crore in mechanised sanitation services, with MCD moving towards an outcome- and service-based model for road sweeping and litter collection.
70 mechanical road sweeping machines to be in use
Sweeping vehicles
The contracts represent an investment of Rs 1,805 crore in mechanised sanitation services like sweeping and collection.