Command centre to track 8,000 vehicles that carry waste, silt

IN ITS 2019 BUDGET, THE BMC ALLOTTED ₹7.53 CRORE TO SET UP THE COMMAND AND CONTROL CENTRE

MUMBAI : To curb malpractices and bring efficiency in municipal departments that use third-party vehicles to transport material such as solid waste or silt removed from Mumbai’s nullahs, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will now get a command and control centre with a video wall, capable of monitoring over 8,000 such contractual vehicles.

After BMC unearthed a scam in its solid waste management (SWM) department in September 2017, where several contractors responsible for transporting the city’s garbage to the dumping grounds were cheating by forging bills and inflating the number of trips, BMC set up a vehicle tracking and monitoring system (VTMS) in these garbage collection vans.

So far, BMC has been tracking 1,586 vehicles of the SWM department and the stormwater drains (SWD) department, which carries out desilting of nullahs.

In its 2019 budget, presented by the municipal commissioner Ajoy Mehta on Monday, the BMC allotted ₹7.53 crore to set up the command and control centre to track 8,000 vehicles of various municipal departments.

These vehicles will be fitted with the VTMS using RFID (radio frequency identification and detection) and GPS (global positioning system), which will send real-time feed to the command centre. This will enable BMC to map trips.

The BMC’S information technology (IT) department and solid waste management (SWM) department will soon float tenders for the construction of the video wall. It has identified a municipal building in Grant Road. A senior civic official said, “We will fix as many monitors as possible on one wall in the room at Grant Road. Staff from the SWM and SWD departments will be stationed in the room to monitor the vehicles. Our tenders presently estimate a cost of ₹4 crore for the project, and we will need more money when we decide to upgrade the system and add more monitors to the wall.”