Gurgaon: Ten mechanised road-sweeping machines meant for nighttime deployment on city roads remained parked at an open ground in Sector 47 even two weeks after a new operations and maintenance contract began on Oct 1.When TOI visited the site at 11.50pm on Wednesday, the machines were found parked, with no repair work underway, raising questions about the readiness of the equipment and MCG’s efforts to improve air quality. At the site, brushes belonging to one of the machines were lying on the ground. The city has a fleet of 24 sweeping machines, of which 10 were found parked at the site.A representative of the private firm awarded the six-month contract confirmed that the machines had been parked at the site even before Oct 1 and were yet to be repaired. “These machines require repairs before we operate them on the roads. It will take another 10 days. Our contract began on Oct 1, but these machines were lying here before that,” said Kaushal, the firm’s representative.With repairs still pending, the Rs 6-crore operations and maintenance contract has yet to translate into these machines being deployed on the roads. The continued absence of these machines from the roads raises questions over MCG’s preparedness to deliver on its clean air action plan submitted to the Commission for Air Quality Monitoring.MCG officials, however, said only two of the 24 machines were non-functional and the remaining machines should have been operational. “This is a matter of investigation. We will probe whether these machines are working or not, why they are parked there and whether they require any repair,” MCG commissioner Pradeep Dahiya told TOI.The issue is significant given the scale of the machinery gap identified in MCG’s clean air plan. The plan estimates that the city needs 72 mechanised road-sweeping machines — 30 large, 38 small and four medium-sized. With 24 machines available, the city faces a shortfall of 48, comprising six large, 38 small and four medium-sized machines. Keeping 10 existing machines off the roads further reduces the equipment available for mechanised cleaning.The civic body had awarded a firm the operations and maintenance contract for the machines in Sept 2019 for five years, until March 31, 2025. It later extended the contract by a year, until March 2026, before floating a tender for a six-month stop-gap arrangement. According to MCG officials, each machine is required to cover at least 30km daily at a speed of 3-5km per hour.
