PMC to review performance-based road cleaning pilot, admits flaws in zone mapping

Pune, October 23, 2026: The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) is to decide whether to extend its performance-based road cleaning experiment. The decision will be taken after reviewing a report on three months of work. The standing committee has asked the administration for a status report by October 30.

The scheme was started by the corporation's solid waste management department as a three-month trial. It made contractors accountable for cleaning their respective areas. If garbage or filth was found during a surprise inspection on the stretch of road assigned to a contractor, a penalty could be imposed.

So far, the PMC has recovered about Rs 6.5 lakh in fines from various contractors. A penalty of Rs 1,000 per worker was imposed for every instance of filth found.

The number of workers engaged in cleaning was also increased under the scheme. There were earlier about 4,500 workers; the number has now been raised to 9,000. The plan was to deploy workers in fixed stretches of 700 metres each.

However, the exercise also exposed flaws in the mapping of cleaning zones. Before fixing boundaries, the administration could not properly measure and classify the roads. As a result, internal roads of private housing societies were also counted along with public roads.

Despite these shortcomings, officials claimed at a meeting that the pilot scheme has improved public cleanliness in the city.

Standing committee chairman Shrinath Bhimale said, "The administration has been asked to submit a status report on the working of the scheme over the past three months by October 30. The standing committee will examine the report and then decide whether the scheme is to be taken forward or not."