PATNA: State urban development and housing minister Suresh Kumar Sharma on Friday asked the engineers of road construction department to fill the narrow spaces between roads and footpaths in the city ital with paver blocks within six months.Addressing media persons on the sidelines of a review meeting, Sharma said there should be no free space between a road and a footpath. “This will reduce the dust particles and allow cleaning of roads with sweeping machines. The bidding process to purchase the sweeping machines is in progress,” he said, adding narrow streets will be manually cleaned by the sanitation workers.The minister said after the suspension of door-to-door garbage collection facility, the government decided to purchase auto tippers to collect dry and wet waste. “One ward will be divided into five sectors and each sector will get one auto tipper to collect garbage from residential areas in three shifts,” Sharma said. He asked the executive official of each circle to identify the land for development of waste transfer station.“The waste from each circle, including New Capital circle, Bankipore, Kankerbagh and Patna City will be deposited in their respective waste transfer stations. The collected waste will be dumped at waste processing plant, which is being developed in Ramchak Bairiya. The waste processing plant will convert the waste into energy,” Sharma said.The minister said in a bid to address the issue of waterlogging, new manholes would be constructed in localities with poor drainage system.The Patna Municipal Corporation (PMC) officials were asked to inspect the desilting of manholes being done by the sanitation workers. “The desilting work started in April, but manholes were not properly cleared,” the minister said. He suggested the PMC officials to use super suction machine for big manholes.The minister also asked the executive officials of different municipal circles in the state capital to chalk out plans to tackle waterlogging problem in low-lying areas, like Kankerbagh, Rajendra Nagar and Lohanipur. He also asked the PMC officials to ensure replacement of the existing sodium vapour street lights with 73,000 energy-efficient LED bulbs by August 31.The meeting was attended by urban development department principal secretary Chaitanya Prasad, Patna divisional commissioner Anand Kishor, Patna mayor Sita Sahu, PMC commissioner Anupam Kumar Suman and deputy commissioner Vishal Anand.

Stay updated with all the Latest Patna headlines here. For more exclusive & live news updates from all around India, stay connected with NYOOOZ.