Historic Tezpur town turns into garbage dumping ground

From a Correspondent

Tezpur, May 11: Tezpur is famous as a city of beauty with tural infrastructure but nowadays it has become a city of garbage due to the frequent strikes by the cleaners under the municipality board and the chaos and hectic lobbying among the municipality board members.

The Tezpur Municipal Board constituted in 1894 under the provision of the municipal act to cover an area of 7.10 sq km, having a council of 19 elected ward commissioners. As per the official record, the Grade II status Tezpur municipality board with a demographical representation of municipal area records 58,559 according to the 2011 census. The slum population inside the municipal area is 6,672. The total house hold in the municipal area is 13,749. However, the denizens here lament that the Tezpur Municipal Board which is committed to provide different facilities to the public like water, street lights, roads and draige and sanitation (lifting and cleaning of garbage), has totally failed to provide these facilities.

Moreover, though in the recent past the Tezpur Municipal Board constructed 43.9 km of roads and 112.95 km of drains for facilitating surface communication and to check the vulnerable water logging problem, it has failed to carry out its exact responsibility.  Besides this, the Tezpur Municipal Board has one public burial ground, seven markets, 33 community halls and five ancient ponds which are in a very unhygienic state due to lack of maintence by the authority.

Again rapid growth of urban population and urbanization has led to an ever increasing demand on urban service. But according to the requirement, the Tezpur Municipal body has not been able to deal with these issues. Meanwhile, the stir that the cleaners (sweepers) have been carrying out for the last few days has today reached the fourth day. The protest is against the non-fulfilment of their demands, including increasing of their salaries by the authority concerned. This has created an awkward situation in the town.  

Following the stir, waste materials including solid waste have been lying scattered everywhere in the town causing an unpleasant odour and also creating health hazards for everyone. Moreover, people alleged that the municipal board authority neither addresses the issue of the safai workers (sweeper) nor takes any initiative in keeping the historic town clean by engaging other workers.

Gautam Barman, a socially aware citizen, said that the permanent employees under the Board also have problems as there is a conflict regarding engagement of private employees for cleaning the town. “The slogans like Clean Tezpur, Green Tezpur, Modi’s Swach Bharat Mission have no any meaning here,” he said and rued that high-profile people beginning from doctors to big businessmen and respectable citizens are also to be blamed as they throw their waste materials in front of their own gates, compounding the garbage dumping problem in the town. “Solid waste gathered by the nursing homes and private chambers are also a problem,” he added.

Meanwhile, for mitigating the problem, a public meeting with representatives of the district administration and the municipal board, senior citizens and jourlists has been called on May 13.