Darjeeling municipality has decided to revamp the garbage disposal system in the hill town and introduce door to door collection of waste in all the 32 wards.

In various nationwide cleanliness surveys, Darjeeling has fared abysmally on all sanitation indicators in the past despite being a major tourist destination in the region.

Darjeeling municipality sources said that the civic bodies have nine garbage clearing vehicles but these are not sufficient.

“A vehicle does three rounds of clearing in a day, yet it is insufficient,” said C.P. Rai, secretary, Darjeeling municipality.

Estimates suggest that the town produces 35 metric tons of waste every day but the figure doubles during tourist season.

Under the new scheme, the Darjeeling municipality will dismantle the 109-odd garbage vats in town and introduce door to door collection.

“We will appoint one nirmal bandhu (cleaner) for every 100 households. Mapping for the project has started and a survey will soon be conducted to collect every detail of the ward,” said Rai. The cleaner will be supervised by a supervisor who will be in charge of two or three wards.

Municipality sources estimated between 22,000 and 24,000 households within the Darjeeling civic area.

The urban body will procure 20 garbage clearing vehicles for the new project.

The state government has, however, decided to scrap its Rs 14 crore bio gas project. Under it, trash was to be segregated before treating it to form bio gas.

At the moment, Darjeeling municipality dumps the waste down the slope at a spot between Sister Nivedita Gram and Mangalpur. The waste usually slides downhill into a stream.

On February 25, 2007, a huge morass of debris slid downhill from the dumping chute burying alive a 10-year-old girl, Sushmita Sarki. The then Bengal governor, Gopal Krishna Gandhi, had visited the spot after the accident and said: “The garbage is thrown down the hill .... to nowhere!”

Darjeeling municipality officers said that the waste would no longer be dumped down the slope.

“A sorter that can sort 134 variants of non-degradable waste will be installed. No waste would be thrown down the hill and the non-degradable waste would be tendered and sold,”said a source.

A different system for collection of garbage from commercial establishments that produce around 100kg of waste per day will be worked out.

The door to door system will attract a fee but its structure has not yet been worked out.

Around 15 years back, the then chairman of Darjeeling municipality, Pasang Bhutia, had started door to door garbage collection as a pilot project. The municipality would charge Re 1 per day per household for it, said an old timer from town. The project was not scaled up after Bhutia’s tenure ended.