Ranchi: To streamline urban sanitation, the Ranchi Municipal Corporation (RMC) is planning to outsource the operation and maintenance of its mechanical road-sweeping fleet.RMC has seven sweeping machines, out of which four are operated directly by the civic body, while the remaining three are managed by an external agency.Under the new arrangement, the selected private operator will take over the entire fleet of machines. The civic body has already floated a request for proposal inviting private agencies to take up the work. The selected agency will be contracted for five years, which is renewable for up to an additional two years depending upon satisfactory work performance.The chosen operator will be responsible for covering a comprehensive 240-lane-km stretch across all the major thoroughfares of the city. RMC city manager Sandeep Kumar said, “One machine covers around 30 to 40 km in one shift. Lane km is the measurement based on the number of lanes in a road instead of the total linear road length.”To ensure there is no traffic hindrance, the selected agency will have to operate the machines late at night when the density of vehicles is at a minimum. The work will be carried out for a minimum of eight hours between 10 pm and 6 am. The cleaning work would cover all major roads, including prominent stretches like Kanke Road, Ratu Road, Main Road, Circular Road, among others.The work of the agency will be divided into two parts. The first consists of regular scheduled cleaning and the second being request facilities, which will be operated on an on-call or emergency basis as needed, such as for key events or during natural calamities like storms and cyclones.To ensure proper operation and maintain administrative oversight, the operator will have to maintain a GPS tracking system in each vehicle along with its associated tracking software. Additionally, the operator must maintain two cameras on each vehicle to effectively monitor the road-sweeping operation. The operator must ensure that these cameras remain operational at all working times, and there must be a complete camera backup of the entire sweeping period.