Pune Municipal Corporation has ordered a fresh verification of the city’s road-cleaning map after it showed around 8,500 kilometres of roads for sweeping, despite the reported actual road length being about 2,396 kilometres. The mapping included internal private roads in large housing societies and may also have counted some roads more than once, raising questions over how cleaning boundaries, staffing and expenditure were determined.
The discrepancy has emerged during a three-month pilot project in which the civic body introduced performance-based road sweeping. Under the programme, the number of workers deployed through contractors was increased from more than 4,500 to 9,000. Manpower was to be fixed according to cleaning areas of 700 metres each, but the administration now faces the task of revising those areas after finding errors in the underlying road inventory.
According to the report by Pudhari, the civic administration acknowledged during a meeting that private internal roads had been included in the mapping. Officials subsequently directed that the earlier mapping be reviewed and that private roads and roads counted more than once be removed. The revised road figures have been ordered within five days.
The review will determine the actual road length covered by the municipal cleaning operation and the number of 700-metre areas that need to be serviced. Until that exercise is completed, the precise basis for deploying 9,000 contract workers and the cost assigned to each cleaning area remains unclear from the reported information.
The issue is significant because the performance-based model links the deployment of cleaning workers and equipment to mapped road areas. An inflated or inaccurate road inventory can affect the distribution of workers, the monitoring of contractor performance and the assessment of whether the city is receiving the service for which it is paying. The administration has claimed that public cleanliness improved during the pilot, but the mapping error has created a separate question about the reliability of the system used to measure and manage that improvement.
The report also states that the meeting raised concerns about permanent sanitation workers in the civic body’s regional offices. Several employees were reportedly found to have remained absent for years, with some absent continuously for more than five years. Officials instructed that proposals for transfer or dismissal action against such workers be submitted.
The parallel issues of long-term absenteeism among permanent staff and the doubling of outsourced manpower have placed the municipal workforce structure under scrutiny. The reported instructions do not establish the final staffing requirement, however, because that will depend on the corrected road measurement and the revised cleaning boundaries.
The Pune Municipal Corporation is expected to receive the corrected road statistics within five days. The revised figures will indicate how many public roads fall within the programme, which private or duplicate stretches have been removed, and what staffing plan will apply to the performance-based cleaning pilot.
