Citizens of Surat can expect better services from the civic body which has set new service level parameters in the city. The Surat Municipal Corportaion (SMC) was selected for Service Level Benchmark (SLB), a project initiated by the Ministry of Urban development to define service level in developing cities.
Surat along with Ahmedabad has found a place in the list of 26 cities across India selected for the project.
Under the Service Level Bench Mark project, civic bodies selected will have to provide better quality of services to citizens. SMC will set new standards after reviewing the current status and will work towards achieving higher goals and provide better standard of services. The four basic urban services for which service level performance parameters will assessed are water supply, sewege, solid waste management and storm water drainage.
The financial aid for the project will be provided to the corporations by the Central government. “The central government has fixed a consultant Eclei, which will analyse the ratio of services provided by SMC and will also help in fixing new benchmarks. The consultant group will analyse extent of services provided to the citizens, will also look into public grievances, quality of service provided, percentage of cost recovery and similar others. A plan will be drafted to cover the gap and new benchmark will be set,” S Aparna, Municipal Commissioner of SMC, said.
“We have formed a core team comprising 24 engineers of SMC to find out our service providing ratio. They will collect data, identify the data gap and preparing performance improvement plan. The project is the need of hour for improving operational and maintenance costs and effective use of resources available with us,” Aparna added.
For implementing the project, SMC has selected West Zone (Rander and Adajan). Once this project achieves set targets, it will be implemented to other zones of the city as well.
