Only 40 mobile toilets for lakhs of volunteers visiting for clean up drive

While BMC officials are happy to have enormous support through lakhs of volunteers of a Haryana-based spiritual group for its clean-up campaign on Tuesday, they are concerned if the city's infrastructure can actually cater to the additional upsurge of people.

Volunteers of the group Dera Sacha Sauda Sirsa-Haryana, they are coming to the city with their cleaning equipment and food, with the aim of cleaning up the entire city in less than a day.

"We will have to provide them with basic facilities at least, such as drinking water and toilets. While providing them with drinking water should not be a problem, we have only 40 mobile toilets across the city. Those will not be sufficient for so many people," said a senior civic official from the solid waste management department of the civic body.

The official informed that the civic body has provided the group with all the required permissions to carry out the drive. "We have sent a circular across all the 24 wards, asking officials to cooperate with the volunteers and help them in every way. Since this drive is taking place immediately after Diwali, many of the officials have resumed work on Monday. That gave us very less time to prepare. We could have made better arrangements, had we known about the plan earlier," the official added.

Elaborating on better planning, the official informed that if the department had more time, they would have been more specific in their approach. "Instead of taking up the entire city at one time, we could have specified the areas which need urgent cleaning. That way, it could have been a systematic process," said the official.