Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) recently launched a ‘Hotel Inspection App’ to speed up hotel inspections and bring transparency in imposing fines on anyone found violating norms, says Hari Chandana Dasari, Zonal Commissioner, West Zone, Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), and shares much more in an interview with Sudheer Goutham of Elets News Network (ENN).
What are some prominent people-friendly initiatives undertaken by your zonal office?
The GHMC is the only municipality body which has launched intensive drives to inspect all hotel and food establishments in Hyderabad. The Corporation periodically inspects these establishments as per the GHMC Hotel and Food Inspection Act.
“We have already given 44-lakh dustbins to segregate the kitchen waste management across the city. We have started pilot colony project in each circle of the city and each officer has to assign to fulfil 100 percent segregation”
Our department recently launched an App called ‘Hotel Inspection App’ to speed up hotel inspections and bring transparency in imposing the fines against those who violate the norms. By launching the App, we eliminated several allegations. For instance, our staff randomly checked the hotels and imposed fines as per their discretion. There were also allegations of officials pocketing the fine amount. This has forced GHMC to introduce a full-fledge mechanism of slapping fine on hotels. There are 34 categories to check measures for the inspection of hotel and food establishment’s across the city. The officials on inspection will be taking a gadget and a printer, the violations identified will be recorded in the App and accordingly the fine amount will pop up. The categories relate to trade and food license, hygiene, silt chambers, waste segregation and disposal method, supply of clean water etc. We have about 2,000 registered hotel establishments and unregistered food centres on the street. Since its launch we have received overwhelming response across all quarters.
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What preparations were made for food inspection in Hyderabad during recent Ramzan month?
During the holy month, GHMC set its high on the hotel establishments and eateries in the city who have been serving Haleem. As many of these are set up on temporary basis during Ramzan, our officers checked all foods, meat to ensure public health at large. We would ask the eateries selling Haleem to only use good quality meat bought from the authorised slaughter houses. One of the proposals being worked out by the officials is to develop a mobile app. The idea is to help citizens rate or give feedback about the food quality and hygiene levels in the hotels in the Greater Hyderabad region.