Kozhikode Becomes India’s First Litter-Free City
Tomorrow, a celebration in Kozhikode will celebrate the city’s declaration of being “litter-free,” after a new program successfully rid the city of its fly-infested trash and overflowing garbage bins. In Kozhikode, a team of 730 “smartly uniformed” women driving autorickshaws pick up garbage from every home, shop, and office, handling 300 tons of waste within the 83 square kilometer city. The autorickshaws hand their trash over to covered garbage trucks, which then take the trash to the refuse yard in Nheliyamparamba, where some waste is turned into manure and the rest is taken to landfills. Residents of the city pay Rs 30 or more a month for the service. But some are boycotting tomorrow’s declaration, dismissing it as a ploy to attract votes in the upcoming local bodies poll.
It’s reminiscent of a certain Simpsons episode where Homer becomes sanitation commissioner, running stellar garbage pick-up service until he runs Springfield’s budget into the ground.
August 17th, 2005 at 4:28 pm
Litter free, neat, clean, sanitified- these were what were been thaught to us right from the times of Mahatma Gandhiji in the modern times. If we do a reality check , where are we today! Long back , a chainese traveller wrote the conditions of India bazzars and roads. We really stand at the same place even today and we talk of taking the country forward!
I guess rich or poor- we have to have an awareness campaign for keeping our roads , colonies, dwellings, toilets, everything spic and span clean. Its not hard, we need to reorganise ourselves and empasize on it through print, television and other available media.
Even Radio-which rural India depends and has the largest penetration. Cant we have an organised way and every person be responsible for keeping ourselves and our enviorns clean so that we pass on a clean, prestine enviorment to comming generation.
Some of the possible solutions.
1) Lets start at the school level teaching higene, sanation, cleanliness and keeping the enviorns clean.Lets emphasise on this very strongly and I am sure it will have an impact on the kids.
2) Show short films, documentaries , how clean the cities, towns and villages are litter free abroad. We might consider using the media.
3) Give employment to the rag pickers and others, who ransack the garbage bins in the wee hours and actually spread the garbage even furthur. The work of these people is to collect all the garbage from house holds in colonies , bazzars ect and they are paid for by the associations of the area or the corporations.
4) Create an awareness to the homemakers in the advantages of desposing of organic and inorganic garbage in neatly tied up plastic bags.
5) Having children and senior citizens work voluntarly in educating the public in commercial aread and residential areas on the importance of having a litter free places.
6) Vendors along the street should also be educated on the issue.
7) We also see that on eve of a procession or a big public meeting, there is lot of garbage and litter collected on the roads and the venues. I guess we have to take the parties involved to task and either have them clean it up or pay for it.
8)Awareness campaign at all levels on cleanliness, higene, sanitation and pollution should be taken up by everybody , vertically and horizontally.
I guess, this should help in solving the problem to some extent. So, people particpation ,NGO and govermental participation in the efforts of keeping the envoriment clean so that we can pass it on to the future generation. The present generation will also have a clean and healthy enviorment around them.
Gurnath