The Siliguri Municipal Corporation has introduced 12 new vehicles to improve garbage collection and disposal across all 47 wards, with the expansion coming ahead of the festive season when the city is expected to generate substantially more waste.
The fleet, comprising dump trucks and earthmovers, will collect and transport garbage to the dumping ground located off the Eastern Bypass on the outskirts of Siliguri. The vehicles were formally introduced at Baghajatin Park on Wednesday by state tourism minister and Siliguri MLA Shankar Ghosh.
The civic body has purchased the vehicles at a cost of ₹4.42 crore with financial assistance from the state urban development and municipal affairs department. The funding support places the fleet expansion within the state’s municipal assistance framework rather than leaving the corporation to finance the purchase entirely from its own resources.
Ghosh said proper waste disposal, adequate drinking water supply, good roads and uninterrupted power supply were among the basic civic services that a municipal body should provide. He said residents had been deprived of these services in the past and that the new trucks and earthmovers had been introduced to improve waste collection and disposal across the civic area.
The vehicles are GPS-enabled, allowing the corporation to monitor their movement centrally. According to Ghosh, the tracking system is intended to help ensure that collection and disposal take place more systematically. The monitoring capability gives the civic body a way to track fleet movement across its wards, although the report does not specify the operating hours, collection routes or the system’s performance benchmarks.
Sources in the civic body said the conservancy department collects around four metric tonnes of waste daily from across Siliguri. The additional vehicles are expected to support the department’s operations during the festive period, when the volume of garbage generated in the city is expected to rise.
The immediate operational challenge for the corporation will be to deploy the vehicles across the city while maintaining regular collection from all 47 wards and ensuring that waste reaches the designated dumping ground. The report does not provide details of staffing, route schedules, disposal practices at the dumping ground or whether the new fleet will replace older vehicles or operate alongside them.
The civic body’s next step is to use the newly introduced fleet for collection and transportation across its wards, with GPS-based monitoring intended to improve oversight of the process.
