HYDERABAD: Garbage hauling is a difficult task. To make it worse, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) has removed garbage bins from the city, leaving sanitation workers to pick up decaying waste, including used diapers, with their bare hands as the corporation has failed to arranged for an alternative.
“I have to pick up decomposed and putrid domestic waste with my bare hands because our corporation has decided to removed bins without arranging for an alternatives,” said a sanitation worker. Earlier, people dumped their garbage in the blue garbage bins located at designated spots around street corners and on the roadside, recalled the worker. These bins, he said, were lifted by jibs onto the garbage trucks without any manual intervention.
However, citizens from various localities told Express that GHMC garbage collectors are collecting waste only twice or thrice a week. “I live 100 metres away from a garbage bin. The garbage collectors, however, only frequent my doorstep thrice a week, so I have to go to the bin and dump waste when it gets accumulated. But, I still pay for garbage collectors every month,” said T Rajender, a resident of Ram Nagar, Attapur. “Since the past one week, there are no bins and I have no option but to dump the waste in the place where the bins used to be kept,” he added.
Another sanitation worker, Arun Kumar, who collects garbage using a mini JCB near First Lancer in Masab Tank, said, “For the past one week I have been working from 5 am to 7 pm everyday. My job is to pile up the waste that is getting scattered due to the lack of bins. Labourers then dump this waste in to trucks.” “It was much easier before. We never had to bother about collecting scattered waste,” he added.
According to the GHMC, once the contract with Ramky Environmental Engineers is finalised, garbage will be hauled twice or thrice a day in the city.