GUDA’s Tech Route for Garbage Collection
If residential societies
in Ahmedabad are grappling
with the problem of irregular
door-to-door garbage
collection for the last five years,
Gandhinagar has an answer to
a similar problem. The Gandhinagar
Urban Development Authority
(GUDA) has initiated an
Information Communication
Technology (ICT) based garbage
collection system, which
literally keeps track of the garbage
collectors and even takes
stock of each individual house
that the collector may have
skipped.
At the centre of the project
is a barcode sticker that will be
pasted on the doors of individual’s
houses. The person who
comes to your house to collect
garbage has to swipe an infrared
swiping machine on the
sticker. The information is immediately
relayed to GUDA.
server that records the data. “If
a family is out on vacation, a
contractor cannot claim payment
for locked houses as every
month a new set of barcode
stickers are issued,” says GUDA
chairman Ashok Bhavsar.
The system has been jointly developed
by Cept university and
GUDA
Not only this, the GPS system
has eliminated the necessity
of placing large bins on the
roadside. “Each of the garbage
container vehicles is connected
via GPS and the route matrix is
planned in such a manner that
each of mini vehicles that collects
garbage from individual
societies will wait at designated
centres to transfer the load to
the container vehicle,” says a
senior GUDA official.
Interestingly, the new system
is implemented outside the
Congress-controlled Gandhinagar
Municipal Corporation
(GMC) limits. GMC is still grappling
with the problem of
streamlining its garbage collection
system.
The total area earmarked
for the ICT garbage collection
facility is 10 sq km, claim GUDA
officials. The system has been
implemented in 300 houses and
will be extended to 4,200 houses
in the next fortnight. When
asked about the revenue model
of the system, officials say that
each of the residential houses
has to pay Rs 30 every month
while that for commercial establishment
the fee is Rs 50. “It
will be onus of society chairman
to provide us a bulk fee for
the entire year for each of individual
houses. Each society will
be given their set of stickers every
month which they would
have to paste on their doors,”
says Bhavsar. GUDA is also distributing
two bins to each of the
houses to separate their wet
and dry waste.