The Nagpur Smart and Sustainable City Development Corporation Limited (Smart City) stands to pay Rs 12.60 crore, over a period of five years, to a Kerala based company which has wet-leased three AI equipped robotic scavenging machines worth Rs 1.35 crore to the civic body. The ownership of the used machines will be transferred to Smart City after the expiry of the lease period.
The company, Genrobotics is headquartered in Trivandrum (Kerala), and manufactures AI based scavenging machines used in declogging of manholes. The light-bodied machines can be loaded on a tempo or any similar small vehicle and taken into narrow bylanes for cleaning manholes. The company claims that it can also work unobtrusively on busy streets without any need for diverting the traffic.
The Smart City hired three machines in September 2022 on a five year wet-lease contract wherein the company deploys manpower to use the robots, transport them and also takes responsibility for their maintenance.
Aptly called ‘Bandicoot’ the robot machine can be lowered into manholes to remove muck using its arms (and an attached bucket), which can be controlled by a handler who operates it from above the manhole. The ‘Bandicoot’ has a camera attached to a screen which enables the operator to guide it.
It overcomes the scourge of manual scavenging as it obviates the need to enter a manhole. A Bandicoot costs Rs 45 odd lakhs and is also available through the Central Government’s e-procurement site for public sector purchases at the same cost.
The Smart City, interestingly, did not purchase the machine but took it on a wet-lease and transfer agreement and is paying Rs 7 lakh per month per machine. It has already paid Rs 4.62 crore for the three machines over a period of 22 months when it could have owned the three units for Rs 1.35 crore.
The Smart City, by virtue of its genius of a contract, will eventually end up paying Rs 12.60 crore for the machines over the five year period.
The same ‘Bandicoots’ have been purchased by other municipal bodies such as the Greater Mumbai municipal corporation, the Surat Municipal Corporation and the Guwahati Municipal Corporation when the price of the machine was much lower than the present Rs 45 lakh. Guwahati’s civic body bought it for Rs 32 lakh each in 2022 when the NMC entered into the wet-lease contract. How smartly it justifies the contract to financial auditors, is anybody’s guess.
The company claims to have supplied Bandicoot robotic systems to 19 states and three union territories.
The Nagpur Municipal Corporation, incidentally, also has 10 jet machines and four suction machines which are truck mounted and used to clean gutters and manholes. These are bigger machines that the civic body has purchased but they cannot enter small bylanes.
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