Daily Times

KARACHI: The major roads of the city are yet to be familiar with the cleaning work of Mechanical sweepers worth millions of rupees imported by the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC), few years ago for cleaning of streets and arteries, it is learnt.

The insiders told Daily Times that all the mechanical street sweepers have been rotting at the KMC ground, near Mewa Shah Graveyard. These mechanical sweepers are parked at the KMC’s Machinery Pool Department, near the graveyard as major spare parts of the machine sweepers have gone missing.

The machines left inactive and off the roads, have been lying abandoned in the open for years and most of them are now out of order and needed an immediate repair to be operational. Years of negligence and lack of maintenance have made these machines non operational, as harsh weather conditions have also added to the damage of those machines. No measures have been taken so far to protect them against such adverse conditions.

It is pertinent to mention that the City District Government Karachi (CDGK) in 2006 had initiated the mechanized sweeping of city roads. Initially, 30 mechanical sweepers were imported, while 28 major streets were spotted for regular machine sweeping. Gradually, the number of machines as well as roads was also increased.

The project had been running successfully with a fanfare for a few years, however since 2010, the sources said, the situation had started worsening and maintenance of majority of the road sweepers was stopped.

These mechanical sweepers were imported from Turkey at the cost of Rs1.45m each and needed a tractor with drawbar to pull it up for sweeping.

At the time of its launch, it was claimed that the machine had a capacity to sweep a track of Shahra-e-Faisal up to eight kilometers within eight hours and had output strength of 60 to 80 times higher than manual sweeping.

The CDGK had announced that, in the initial stage, mechanized sweeping of about 200 kilometers of city roads would be undertaken on a daily basis. It had also claimed that importing these machine sweepers would also pave the way for the program to privatize garbage collection in the city.