BHUBANESWAR: Even as Odisha government claims to have successfully implemented several schemes in the urban areas of the State, an audit revealed that the urban local bodies (ULBs) did not get the performance grants of 14th Finance Commission to the tune of Rs 333.58 crore due to non-achievement of service-level benchmarks in water supply, waste management and storm water drains.
The Ministry of Urban Development has set benchmarks at the national-level for service provision in four key sectors - water supply, sewerage, solid waste management and storm water management. Since monitoring the performance and improvements is envisaged as the goal of the service-level benchmarking, Odisha failed to achieve the target resulting in loss of Central assistance.
As per the interim report of the performance audit carried out by Accountant General, the ULBs in the State did not utilise the funds provided for creation of capital assets by the Central and State Finance Commissions. The expenditure on solid waste management was not commensurate with the funds available with the ULBs, resulting in accumulation of unutilised balances of Rs 964.83 crore by March 2020.
The ULBs inspected were not collecting user fee from 2017-21 resulting in short realisation of user fee of Rs 160.71 crore, found the audit. The audit observed that Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) made two contracts for mechanical sweeping between October 2018 and December 2018 (Package-I for 172 km and Package-II for 146.59 km) at Rs 5.23 crore and Rs 5.08 crore per year for three years, respectively.
The agencies were paid interest free advance of Rs 13.37 crore (between October 2018 and October 2020) without any agreement clause for payment of advance which remained unadjusted as of March 2021.It was also observed that prior to adoption of mechanical sweeping, manual sweeping was done in those areas and BMC did not make any revision in the scope of manual sweeping till March 2021 leading to overlapping of works and unwarranted maintenance cost of Rs 10.32 crore per year.
The test checked ULBs had not conducted any survey during the period 2015-20 but adopted per capita estimate for waste generation that had low level of reliability. As the ULBs did not prepare short-term or long-term action plans for waste management, the planning and selection of infrastructure projects in ULBs were driven by perceived availability of funds rather than need-based analysis.
The ULBs were able to process only one to two per cent of waste collected. They were operating disposal facilities without valid authorisation from pollution control board and necessary environmental clearance.
The landfill sites operated were in violations to Municipal Rules and lacked basic infrastructure. There was evidence of unscientific dumping and burning of mixed waste in the landfills, the audit found.
While there was significant shortage of manpower for executing waste management, monitoring of waste management was deficient at all levels and attaining the objective of sustainable cities and communities was a distant dream.
The performance audit on ‘Waste management in Urban areas/Smart cities’ was conducted for the period from 2015-16 to 2019-20. Out of 114 ULBs, 21 ULBs were selected by using stratified random sampling method based on population of 2011 census in cities.
AUDIT REPORT
ULBs inspected were not collecting user fee from 2017-21 resulting in short realisation of user fee of Rs 160.71 cr
ULBs were able to process only 1 to 2% of waste collected
They operated disposal facilities without authorisation from pollution control board and necessary environmental clearance