AMC’s out of the box thinking pays results – But not up to the mark!

GNN | Feb 01, 2020, 12:36 PM IST|

• Civic body manages just over 1 lakh pieces of feedback in Swachhta Sarvekshan
• Ahmedabad ranked 6th in the overall list and was titled the ‘Cleanest Big City’.

GNN Report
Ahmedabad: As of Friday (January 31) evening, when the Swachhta Sarvekshan (Cleanliness Survey) came to an end, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation has managed to collect feedback from just 109,657 of the 6.5m citizens of Ahmedabad. In the 6,000-point survey, citizen feedback is a key component, as it carries a 25% weightage.
Unfortunately for the AMC, even this poor feedback it could manage to collect did not come easily.
Well aware that a poor response from citizens would directly impact Ahmedabad’s ranking, the AMC did some out of the box thinking and came out with creative solutions. The first step was to reach out to people at the hugely successful Flower Show organised on the River Front in January. Bottles of flavoured milk were given away to visitors at the visitors in exchange for an online feedback. Similarly, AMC also reached out to private colleges and asked students for a positive feedback.
The AMC also tapped security guards of commercial complexes and malls to get feedback. But though AMC left no stone unturned in getting the feedback and procuring one lakh pieces of feedback, the city failed to break into the Top-10 list in terms of citizen feedback.
Much smaller cities including Ghaziabad, Lucknow, and Agra (all in Uttar Pradesh) have each managed to get more than 10 lakh responses. Surat, the second biggest city of Gujarat also managed 287,122 responses from its citizens.
Expectedly opposition Congress dubs this as an exercise to waste both time and money. Veteran Congress leader Badruddin Shaikh said AMC must focus on the ground reality of cleanliness rather than this numbers game. “No street is clean and dustbins are missing from the streets,” he said. Raising a question on the credibility of this feedback, Badruddin said, “Even students and government employees were ordered to give feedback.”