Sanitation workers call off strike; crisis far from over

 Garbage piled up by roadside across 5 zones of NMC due to strike.

Staff Reporter ;

The three-day-long strike by contract sanitation workers of M/s Anthony Waste Handling Pvt. Ltd. was called off on Sunday, but not before citizens in parts of city suffered from stinking waste that lay scattered on the roads, that too, when Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) was busy celebrating Cleanliness Fortnight. The entire fleet of 1,800 workers associated with the Powerfund Workers’ Union has rejoined duty and initiated localised cleanup operations. Sameer Tonpe, Assistant General Manager and Project Head of AG Enviro Infra Pvt Ltd, confirmed that the employees ended their agitation and resumed regular door-to-door garbage collection across the affected areas.
Despite the resumption of work, city faces a severe backlog of accumulated waste.

Over the last three days, hundreds of tonnes of leftover garbage have piled up, remaining either stored inside residential households or lying scattered along the roadsides of Zone No 1 to 5, which include Laxmi Nagar, Dharampeth, Hanuman Nagar, Dhantoli, and Nehru Nagar. Given that these five core zones generate roughly 700 tonnes of municipal waste daily, sanitation crews face an uphill task to clear the bottlenecks clogging the streets.
Abhijeet Jha, corporator Prabhag 12, said the sight in entire Prabhag was quite pitiful as garbage remained unlifted for three days. The rains further compounded the problems as stench from the waste further caused severe uncomfort to citizens. NMC needs to tidy up its monitoring to avoid such mess in the future.
Contractor warns of potential strike resumption: While the immediate crisis has subsided, the core financial friction between the NMC and the private concessionaire remains highly volatile.

The central issue remains the outstanding Rs 16.20 crore that the NMC owes the contractor for unpaid operational and statutory dues spanning January, February, March, and April.
The company has reiterated that it has been forced to clear the workers’ routine salaries out of its own pocket for the past five months to prevent a total systemic collapse. However, if this continues for long, the management warned that, it will completely exhaust its financial reserves and options to personally fund these massive amounts.
The company explicitly stated that, if the NMC does not immediately clear its mounting dues, another strike could be triggered at short notice. Without a swift capital injection from the civic administration to clear the backlog, the threat of an even more crippling sanitation breakdown continues to loom over the city.