TIRUCHY: The corporation’s move to bring all the 38 micro-compost centres in the city under advanced CCTV surveillance has improved functionality in most of the waste processing units, say officials. The civic body commissioner recently suspending a worker after remotely monitoring the CCTV footage has improved attendance and punctuality at the micro-compost centres, they pointed out.
Pointing to how officials had to earlier resort to undertaking random physical inspections to monitor micro-compost centres, a sanitation officer said, “We could not completely focus on all the centres. This made some work lethargically and dump waste without segregation. There were also issues of workers skipping duty after marking attendance.
The cameras sorted out all the issues.” Sources also held a few ground-level officials responsible for the poor management of micro-compost centres. However, all this changed when Corporation Commissioner R Vaithinathan, who along with a few other officials who can under the advanced surveillance system directly interact with any micro-compost centre, suspended a worker over alleged dereliction of duty.
"Earlier, labour union leaders used to enter compost centres without permission. Similarly, some workers also used to go to union meetings after marking attendance. But all these issues are not there anymore as workers fear that the commissioner is regularly checking the cameras and sometimes, he also issues directions," a corporation worker requesting anonymity said.
When enquired, Commissioner R Vaithinathan said that he is planning more steps to improve the compost centres’ functionality. "We are also planning to put boards at each centre where the workers have to enter the quantity of waste received and segregated each day. We would be monitoring it through the cameras," he said.
On the plans, a senior official said, "We are getting the records of each centre. But once we put up the boards, senior officials would be able to undertake random inspections from their office itself by checking the cameras.
As the management has improved in the last few weeks, we are expecting the system would soon stop the piling up of garbage at the centres. If everything goes well, most centres would stop witnessing such pile-up in a year."