Navi Mumbai emerged as the country’s third cleanest city in the Swachhta Survey 2022 under the Swachh Bharat Mission, improving its position from last year’s fourth. As always, it also secured first rank in Maharashtra.
The secret of the consistent performance of the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation (NMMC), which has been securing a place for the satellite city among the country’s 10 cleanest, lies in its innovative programmes and effective waste management.
For the Cleanliness Survey 2022, the civic administration had taken a number of measures to give the city a new look. It took the help of students from the Sir J J School of Arts in Mumbai who decorated important joints, illuminated flyovers and underpasses with LED lights, made electric poles attractive, and created paintings on the walls along railway tracks and highways.
The civic body also went about systematically creating awareness about cleanliness at a mass level, losing no opportunity to use any platform for this purpose.
“We came up with the unique concept of 'donation shelf’,” an official from the corporation’s Solid Waste Management Department told The Free Press Journal. “It involved setting up 30 shelves at different places in the city with the message, 'Give what you don't want, take what you want’. Citizens could bring unwanted household items, clothes and materials to the donation shelf while those in need could pick them up from there. Earlier, these items were going to the dumpyards.”
The corporation has also set up seven state-of-the-art sewage treatment plants, of which the Koparkhairane and Airoli plants can recycle up to 20 million litres a day at the tertiary level and supply the purified water to industrial units. This results in saving water while the civic body also generates revenue from the sale of recycled wastewater.
In addition, the civic body started the 'Zero Waste Slum’ model and saved money on transportation of waste. On an experimental basis, the civic body started door-to-door waste collection in five slums – Hanuman Nagar in Turbhe, Indiranagar in Turbhe, Advali Bhutawali, Samatanagar in Airoli and Bindumadhav Nagar in Digha. The collected wet waste is disposed of at compost peats in the same area. “This initiative has received appreciation,” the official said.
Important measures taken by NMMC for cleanliness survey:
The civic body has set up 'Pet Corner' at various places to prevent pets from defecating anywhere.
Street plays were held across 111 wards at one go in cleanliness that got a place in 'Best of India Records.'
NMMC installed a giant 28.5 feet tall flamingo sculpture made from 1790 waste machine parts from 26 different machines, with the concept of 'sustainable from waste'.
It created a nature park at an old garbage dumping yard by planting 60,000 native species of trees.
It now emphasizes on dry, wet and hazardous household waste segregation at source.
Wastes are converted into fertilizer, and plastic granules, making paver blocks of construction debris.
A special Grievance Redressal System is operational to register complaints regarding cleanliness and the complaints received are resolved within 24 hours.
Tracking of garbage vehicles with RFID chip.
