Trichy: Taking a cue from police patrol and beat vehicles assigned for surveillance activity, the Trichy Corporation has launched an exclusive mobile solid waste management (SWM) flying squad. With an officer on board, the squad will identify and penalise people on the spot for violations pertaining to the revised solid waste management (SWM) rules. The civic body has identified several hotspots in the city where public littering is significant and the squad will be spending additional hours in inspecting such neighbourhoods.So far, the civic body had been heavily spending time and resources on spreading awareness on SWM such as source segregation and mandatory handing over of accumulated domestic waste to sanitary workers in door-to-door waste collection. Acknowledging that the need to penalise residents who are not cooperating with the efforts of the civic body to improvise city’s cleanliness, Trichy Corporation has planned to target frequent violators considered as hindrance in achieving litter free roads status.From this week, a vehicle belonging to the urban local body (ULB) will be assigned to supervise all the 65 wards to penalise the offenders caught red-handed while littering. The squad will also penalise shops if they fail to place two bins each for biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste in their establishments.“A sanitary officer will be on board the SWM squad vehicle to oversee cleanliness of all four zones in civic body limits. The officer will be equipped with spot fine enabled gadget, commercial establishments including eateries will be focused as we have been receiving complaints on them found dumping waste on roads,” corporation commissioner N Ravichandran told TOI.Unlike monitoring and penalising only the residents and commercial entities, the SWM squad will inspect the performance and cleaning activities of fellow officials and sanitary workers as allegations were raised about burning waste mounds along the roads in Karumandapam and Ponmalai localities.“Streamlining sanitary workers burning the waste along city roads is the need of the hour, a little more awareness among residents is necessary to achieve behavioural change,” honorary president of Trichy district Exnora, C Balasubramanian said. Even though the civic body has generated more than Rs 2.6 lakh throrugh penalties for non-compliance of SWM rules in the past seven months, it maintained that the objective was not to generate revenue but to streamline public.

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