The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC): New Policies and Initiatives

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has introduced several new policies and ideas for the betterment of its employees as well as the general public. The BMC employs about 125,000 people, out of which 70,000 are categorized Class 3 and 20,000 as Class 4. In a new policy with the aim to increase the productivity of its Class 3 and 4 employees, the management has planned to decrease the time taken to travel to work. This was borne out of the recent decrease in the efficiency of the workers, especially the ones who travel more than 2 hours to work. They are planning to achieve this by posting the first set of BMC staff, which includes nurses, ward boys and technicians, at hospitals located in the vicinity of the rail-head closest to their homes. Employees will be posted at a medical care facility located near Western, Central and Harbor railway lines along which they live, so they will not be required to switch trains to get to work. After the scheme has been applied for to all the new recruits and transfers that are imminent in the health department, the BMC plans to apply this new policy to the city's civic engineers.

Also, in a new innovative way, the BMC has come up with two short films of which one is an animated cartoon movie that highlights the importance of healthy eating and how it can be incorporated in one’s life to prevent diabetes and hypertension. This was part of the anti diabetes and anti obesity drive that BMC has undertaken. The animated movie targets the kids and creating awareness in their young minds.

The civic administration has recently tested 12,695 people from Mumbai at 92 camps to check blood sugar across the city. At these camps it was found that about 773 people had abnormal sugar levels and they were asked to undergo further tests.

Although the civic body's drive showed a 6% prevalence of diabetes in the city, other studies have pegged it at 10% along with another 15% who are in the pre-diabetes stage. According to recent statistics, about 60% of the deaths occur due to non-communicable diseases. Hence it is considered very important to educate people about the problems of obesity and diabetes and the initiative taken by BMC is a big step in creating awareness.

Source-Medindia