Over a hundred urban maintenance vehicles turn to junk

Sukkur: The warehouse of the Sukkur Municipal Corporation (SMC) gives the look of a topsy-turvy graveyard of destroyed vehicles that were procured for urban maintenance and cleaning at a cost of tens of millions of rupees from the national exchequer. Outside, broken roads and garbage dumps along the streets of the third-largest city in Sindh province keep growing. But the SMC has no explanation to offer.

In 2011, the Sindh government handed over sanitation, drinking water supply, and solid waste management in the northern districts of the province to the North Sindh Urban Services Corporation (NSUSC), a utility company owned by participating local governments. The move, supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), was aimed at improving the sanitation system in the Upper Sindh districts of Sukkur, Larkana, Khairpur, Ghotki, and Jacobabad.

Until 2017, the NSUSC spent tens of millions of rupees on procuring scores of maintenance and cleaning vehicles and other equipment. But the garbage dumps across these five districts continued to rise and multiply, raising questions over NSUSC’s performance. The corporation also failed to ensure a smooth supply of drinking water, and at one point the issue became so serious that the Sindh High Court (SHC) as well as the Supreme Court (SC) took notice of it.

In 2017, the government decided to shift the tasks of drinking water supply and maintenance of drainage systems back to the concerned municipal authorities. When it handed over charge, NUSUC also handed over the vehicles and other sanitation and drainage equipment it had acquired. These included a number of modern urban maintenance vehicles. The municipal authorities started to use these vehicles for cleaning and sanitation. Over time, when a vehicle developed a fault, instead of fixing it, the authorities started to park them in their warehouses.

So, the vehicles that could have been re-used after minor repairs continued to pile up in those warehouses. And since there was no oversight, it gave the staffers at various levels a chance to steal tyres and other valuable parts of those vehicles, turning them into piles of junk. This correspondent saw more than a hundred such vehicles lying in Sukkur’s municipal warehouse alone, turning it into a virtual automobile graveyard.

The condition of cleanliness in Sukkur city is a direct consequence of this. The state of the intersection at Nawan Goth, a densely populated area, is an example. The Union Council (UC) chairman of the area, Zakir Bandhani, complains that the officers of the Municipal Corporation do not consider the people of this area as human beings.

”Businesses have been destroyed. Accidents happen here every day. We have met with the higher authorities and told them that the sanitation conditions in Nawan Goth are very bad, but no one is ready to listen to us. I don’t know who else to ask for some mercy,” he said.

Javed Memon, the president of Sukkur Development Alliance (SDA), a conglomerate of different political, social, and trade organisations, told Bol News that action should be taken against officers of the municipal corporation who allowed those vehicles to be parked instead of being repaired and put to work and then failed to prevent the theft of their valuable parts. ”These vehicles were bought with public tax money; no municipal officer had bought them from his own pocket,” he remarked.

He pointed to the state of cleanliness in Sukkur city, where ”piles of garbage are lying all over the place, for everybody to see. They (the municipal authorities) claim that there aren’t enough sanitation vehicles to handle the situation. But the point is, when they allow vehicles worth millions to turn into junk, then they should have no option but to answer for their own incompetence.”

Javed Memon called on the Deputy Commissioner (DC) Sukkur to visit the SMC’s warehouse and see for himself how valuable vehicles have been vandalised and left to rot.

When contacted, the Municipal Commissioner of Sukkur, Muhammad Ali Shaikh, admitted that the corporation lacked vehicles for sanitation and was facing difficulties. But he declined to comment on the defunct vehicles in the warehouse, saying it was an issue that predated his posting in Sukkur.