ONGOLE: Podili Nagara Panchayat was selected for the ‘Swachh Shahar Samvaad’ award presented by the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. Podili Nagara Panchayat Commissioner K Daniel Joseph received the award from the Minister of State for the Housing and Urban Development Koushal Kishore at a function held in New Delhi on Friday.
Podili Nagara Panchayat was selected for the ‘Clean Towns Contest’ in the ‘below 50,000’ population category. From the state, Visakhapatnam was selected in the municipal corporations category and Srikakulam in the municipalities category. Podili village panchayat was upgraded as Nagara Panchayat in 2021 by merging seven surrounding small hamlets into it. There are 20 Wards with around 9,200 households in the nagar panchayat.
As some of the villagers moved court against the merger plan, the Nagara panchayat elections were not held and the Markapur-RDO is presently acting as the special officer for the Podili-Nagara Panchayat council.K Daniel Joseph took charge as the second commissioner after Bhavani Prasad and has been working hard to make the municipality clean and green.
Podili Nagara Panchayat has 82 sanitation staff and over 250 Nagar Panchayat secretariat staff and volunteers. Since February, the Nagara Panchayat is continuously conducting the sanitation awareness programmes including rallies and demonstrations and special drives in the municipality limits.
Door-to-door segregated domestic waste collection is yielding good results. Every Tuesday, special drainage and sanitation drives are conducted to clean drains. They adopted a special Garbage Transport System to take waste to the dumping yard spreads over 2 acres of land, which is 3.5 km away from the municipality.