LAHORE: A decision has been taken to conduct a secret survey to assess the performance of the Suthra Punjab programme and the Model Village projects.
According to sources, the scope of covert monitoring will be widened further to assess implementation against set targets and to gauge conditions on the ground. A zero-tolerance policy has been adopted against any form of corruption or irregularity in the projects.
Strict action will be taken on complaints of poor performance in the sanitation process, negligence, or misuse of resources. Any complaint of negligence or corruption in the Suthra Punjab programme will be treated as unpardonable.
According to sources, the Chief Minister’s Inspection Team and other relevant channels are being deployed for the secret survey. The covert survey will assess the standard of cleanliness and the facilities being provided to the public.
Daily digital monitoring of the Suthra Punjab programme has also begun, under which sanitation operations, field activities and project progress will be reviewed on a daily basis.
The government has directed the relevant institutions to further improve performance and to ensure the prompt redress of public complaints.
The rationale for an unannounced audit is straightforward and applies to service delivery everywhere: announced inspections measure the capacity to prepare for an inspection, not the standard of ordinary operation. A scheduled visit produces a swept street; an unannounced one produces the street as it actually is on a Tuesday afternoon.
The method has limits worth acknowledging. Covert surveys generate snapshots rather than trends, and a single observation cannot distinguish a bad day from a systemic failure. They are most useful when combined with continuous data — which is what the parallel introduction of daily digital monitoring is intended to supply.
Suthra Punjab is the provincial government’s flagship sanitation initiative, extending organised waste collection beyond the major cities — where it had been handled by dedicated waste management companies — into tehsils, small towns and rural union councils that had historically had no formal system at all.
Its operating model relies on outsourced collection, door-to-door pickup, defined collection points and transfer to designated disposal sites, monitored through vehicle tracking and worker attendance systems. The Model Village programme runs alongside it, packaging sanitation with street paving, drainage, water supply and other basic amenities at the village level.
Sanitation programmes in Punjab have historically failed at three predictable points, and these are where a covert survey should look.
The first is the last mile: waste collected from households but deposited at an intermediate point rather than transported to a disposal site. The second is workforce attendance — ghost workers, or staff present on paper and deployed elsewhere in practice. The third is disposal itself: even efficient collection produces little public health benefit if the terminal site is an unlined dump beside a watercourse.
Residents’ assessments of the programme vary sharply by locality. In areas where door-to-door collection is functioning, the improvement is not visible and widely acknowledged. Elsewhere, complaints centre on irregular collection days, uncollected accumulation at neighbourhood points, and blocked drains during monsoon.
The most consistent public request is not for more inspection but for accountability that citizens can see: publication of collection schedules for each union council, and a complaint mechanism that produces a traceable response rather than an acknowledgement.
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