New Delhi: In a bid to integrate and offer better working conditions to ragpickers in the national capital, civic body officials are working on a scheme to bring them under a formal organised system.
The South Delhi Municipal Corporation along with its East Delhi counterpart is going to start a zero waste management project on a pilot basis in Dwarka and West Vinod Nagar area.
“The aim is to integrate and formalize the services of ragpickers. These people work in extremely unhealthy environmental conditions. The need of the hour is to bring them under the formal system of collection, segregation, transportation and disposal of wastes,” said South Delhi Municipal Commissioner (SDMC) Manish Gupta, who is also the acting Commissioner of the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC).
Under the zero waste management initiative, these ragpickers will be organised by NGOs and each one of them would be allotted 150 households.
The municipal corporation will provide them support with infrastructure and protective gears like gloves, uniform, bins, rickshaw and identity cards. The ragpickers would go from house to house with two bins and collect the dry and wet wastes separately, for which they will also charge a nominal fee Rs 30 a month.
Then they will transport the wastes to the facility centre where they will be provided a sorting shed, so that they can sort the dry wastes like plastic, polythene bags, bottles into various components and sell it off to recyclers themselves. The wet wastes will be put into bio-mechanisation plants to generate methane gas which in turn could be used for producing electricity.