Outsourcing of cleanliness operations trips Chennai Municipal Corporation news
Venkatachari Jagannathan
05 September 2007

Chennai: Fed up of the mound of garbage piling up in Chennai, the Chennai Municipal Corporation has outsourced the job of keeping the southern metro clean. Private garbage clearance company Neel Metal Fanalca Environment Pvt Ltd, which has won the contract, will import around 1,000 plastic garbage bins from Otto, Bangkok.

The bins will be deployed in the three Chennai Corporation Zones where the company has won the bid to clear the garbage.

"We will import 600- and 700-litre bins and the deliveries are expected shortly," says J S Batra, CEO, SPV, Neel Metal.

The garbage clearing company Neel Metal Fanalca is a 51:49 joint venture between Neel Metal Products Limited and Fanalca SA, Columbia. Neel Metal Products is part of the Delhi-based Rs2,000-crore diversified JBM group.

Fanalca, which operates in Latin American countries, collects more than 2,700 tonne of solid waste everyday.

In Chennai, the joint venture won the Chennai Corporation''s mandate to clear garbage in four zones, though, the corporation has handed over three zones and will entrust the fourth only after evaluating its performance.

According to the agreement, Neel Metal Fanalca has to clear 1,100 tonnes of garbage every day. The company would get paid at the rate of Rs673 per tonne in two zones and Rs645 in the remaining.

Though Neel Metal Fanalca took charge of the cleaning-up operation in the three zones effective from the early hours of 26 August, something somewhere seems tio have gone wrong since the initial couple of days saw vast amounts of garbage piling up.

The company is said to have brought in inadequate manpower, garbage bins and garbage compacting trucks and hook loaders, perhaps underestimating Chennai''s capacity to generate garbage.

The citizens rightly coined the phrase stinkara (stinking) Chennai that rhymed with the official slogan singara (beautiful) Chennai and the issue soon became mired in a major political controversy over … you guessed it, garbage. Opposition parties like AIADMK called its cadres to clear the garbage.

The Chennai Corporation has now served a show cause notice to Neel Metal Fanalca for its poor showing. The corporation had to bring its own lorries and personnel in an emergency clean-up operation in addition to sending out an SOS to the previous clearing agency, Chennai Environmental Services, commonly known as Onyx, as its seven-year term had ended.

So why did Fanalca that has prior experience elsewhere in the world falter in Chennai? Not agreeing with the view that the company had tripped up in its promised service delivery, S Pattabhiraman, vice president, Neel Metal Fanalca, says, "The previous contractor failed to clear garbage for one week prior to our taking over. The situation worsened owing to the accumulated pile up and some reasons that were beyond our control."

He also said the company had placed an order for the bins with Sintex Industries well in advance. Owing to a fire accident in Sintex Industries'' plant, the bin deliveries were delayed.

According to Neel Metal Fanalca''s estimates the three zones would require around 3,700 bins of 660- and 770-litre capacity. Not only did it deploy 300 fewer bins than it should have, even its bins had a lower capacity by 300-400 litres compared to what Onyx had deployed earlier.

"Our cleaning model involves source segregation and door-to-door collection of garbage. This requires a fewer number of bins," explains Pattabhiraman.

Facing flak, the company has now installed bigger plastic drums to collect the garbage.

Pattabhiraman also said that he expected deliveries of compacting trucks soon. It is understood to be supplied by a group company. The company has estimated a fleet requirement of 32 compacting trucks, 10 hook loaders and 160 Tata Ace 1-tonne trucks.

But for the Tata Ace fleet, the company seems to have fallen short of its own requirement of various vehicles. The company has just one compactor and deliveries of 27 trucks are expected. As a stopgap measure it is using 43 tippers to ferry the garbage to the landfills.

On manpower, too, the company is facing severe problem. Unlike Onyx that employed conservancy staff, Neel Metal Fanalca decided to rely on labour outsourcers to supply the workers.

Out of total 2,700 people who reported for work initially, 1,500 quit their job immediately. "We had actually budgeted for 1,500 conservancy staff. Now we have 1,200," remarks Pattabhiraman.

He also says, the company has decided to change its human resource policy and employ the workers and has now hired 300 so far. The coming days will prove whether the stinkara Chennai becomes singara Chennai.
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Outsourcing of cleanliness operations trips Chennai Municipal Corporation