In a major rehabilitation plan for beggars and ragpickers in its jurisdiction, the North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) is planning to engage them to manage community toilet complexes. The civic body said that this novel initiative for their empowerment would be launched by April.
According to chairman, department of environment management services committee, NDMC, Vijay Prakash Pandey, the plan will be launched under the Atm Nirbhar (self-dependent) scheme. For the purpose, the civic body will provide institutional help in forming cooperatives of beggars and ragpickers. After formation of the cooperatives, they will be entrusted the task of running the toilet blocks.
“The DEMS with the help of NGOs working with these people will work for setting up cooperatives which will be initially given responsibility to run public toilets in JJ clusters. Later on they may be associated with upkeep of toilets of other categories,” said Mr Pandey.
The executive wing of the North Delhi Municipal Corporation is proposing to engage beggars and ragpickers for maintenance of toilet complexes and urinals. After final of proposal by executive wing it will be placed before DEMS committee for approval.
As per the initial plan, as the proposal the group or cooperative will authorised a nominal charge from the users and the money collected will be used for maintain the toilet blocks. There are around 700 CTC or urinal blocks under the civic body.
“Draft proposal is getting ready and it will ensure the user charges should be nominal and CTC or urinals block should be allotted only to the group nor an individual,” added Mr Pandey.
The plan will be rolled out with the start of next financial year and would be a major social initiative before going for the civic polls, due next year.
If the scheme is successful, the experiment may also be replicated for door-to-door garbage collection. The municipal corporation is also working on giving the public toilets in its jurisdiction to private agencies for ensuring cleanliness and better upkeep.
Also, under the Swachch Bharat campaign, the civic body has planned to hand over maintenance of toilets to corporates to bring down the expenditure on it.
