LAHORE:Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday gave officials seven days to fix staffing and machinery gaps in the Suthra Punjab sanitation programme, ordering that private contractors scoring below 50 percent in any tehsil be removed and replaced by services run directly by local administrations.
Companies performing below 80 percent will receive warnings. The chief minister also ordered the programme’s beat system to be rolled out across the province within a week and asked for a detailed micro-plan for cleanliness and a progress report by next week.
She ordered officials to clear sanitation workers’ outstanding dues and agreed that the money should be recovered from the defaulting company, saying workers should not suffer for contractors’ unpaid liabilities. She also called for a legal mechanism to guarantee their salaries on time.
The instructions follow months of trouble. The programme, launched in December 2024 and run largely through about 140 private contractors on a Rs170 billion budget for 2026-27, has faced worker protests over delayed pay in Lahore, Faisalabad, Sargodha, Okara and Rawalpindi.
In August, officials reported more than Rs10.51 billion in penalties imposed on contractors, some of whom withheld wages while disputing the fines, and a sanitation tax that had raised only about Rs1 billion of a planned Rs70 billion a year. The provincial anti-corruption body registered a case in May alleging Rs1 billion in embezzlement and 633 ghost employees in Faisalabad and Tandlianwala.
The meeting was told that assistant commissioners and Suthra Punjab in-charges would be held responsible for failures in their tehsils, and that anti-littering squads had made 264,000 visits across the province. Rural areas are to be cleaned at least every other day and accumulated rubbish removed from villages.
Weekly reports on staff, beat-level machinery and field monitoring officers will be required from every tehsil. Chakwal Deputy Commissioner Sarah Hayat and her team were commended for their district’s performance, and a mobile application for workers is under consideration.
The government had already ordered a secret survey to audit the programme in September, days before presenting it as the world’s largest sanitation drive on World Cleanup Day. It did not name the contractors now facing removal.
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