Pune Municipal Corporation has extended its experimental road-sweeping system by three months after elected representatives reported a significant improvement in city cleanliness during the initial trial. The extension will cost the civic body Rs 13 crore a month and will continue the model in which contractors are responsible not only for supplying workers but also for ensuring that roads are actually cleaned.
The three-month experiment, which began on 1 August and was scheduled to end on 31 October, involved adding 4,700 contractual workers to the civic workforce. The Pune Municipal Corporation already has about 5,500 employees engaged in sweeping and related work. Earlier, contractors supplied workers while municipal health inspectors and supervisors were responsible for allocating work and checking whether it had been completed.
Under the earlier arrangement, contractors could not be held directly responsible when sweeping was inadequate because their formal responsibility was limited to providing manpower. The revised system shifted wider operational responsibility to contractors, including the delivery and monitoring of cleaning work. The extension was approved at a meeting of the civic standing committee after the administration presented details of the trial.
According to the report, the new system placed greater emphasis on the level of cleanliness achieved rather than only on worker attendance. Standing committee members said the city had become cleaner over the past three months, while contractors whose work was considered inadequate were fined. Standing committee chairman Shrinath Bhimale said contractors could lose the work if their performance did not improve during the extended period.
Deputy commissioner of the solid waste management department Santosh Warule said the standing committee had decided to extend the contracts and that implementation would follow administrative approval from the municipal commissioner. The extension has been granted because the civic administration could not issue a fresh tender for the next one-year period during the Legislative Council election code of conduct.
The operational scale of the arrangement remains substantial. Pune has about 2,300 kilometres of roads according to the municipal figures cited in the report, while road mapping data indicates a total road length of 6,919 kilometres. Each worker is assigned approximately 300 metres of road for sweeping. The expanded sweeping operation has also increased the city’s daily waste volume by about 200 tonnes, according to the report.
The additional three-month period is intended to allow the civic administration to address shortcomings identified during the trial and prepare a new tender for the following year. The municipal corporation will continue assessing contractor performance before deciding the longer-term structure of Pune’s road-sweeping services.
