Community Cleaning

Indians have always been good at personal hygiene but the buck seems to stop at the gates of their homes. How things are beyond that is for the government to take care is the policy adopted by most Indians. Not only waste management almost everything related to civic sense is considered the responsibilities of the government entities.

Indians who travel abroad always admire the cleanliness and shower praise on the countries standing from their rooftops when they return home, and there ends the story. In almost all countries the taxes collected are more or less the same; the functional bodies that oversee the work are the same, what differs is the community participation by the people in these countries and Indians.

If you travel across India in trains the most common scene that you will see is people throwing the cups outside after drinking their chai or coffee. The most common argument is that there are no dustbins inside the trains, a point I hope the Indian Railways will rectify. My point is what is stopping you from keeping the cups under your train seat? Railways is cleaning the trains at the end of the journey, they can dispose it for you?

The corporation authorities in many cities have been taking some good steps in the last few years like garbage collection at a particular hour. They have been educating the people about garbage segregation at the source. The amount of participation from the general public has been poor. You can still see many dumping grounds at street corners. Similarly the people who collect and dispose the garbage must also be educated about the importance of their job, many a times I have seen the garbage guy just dumping everything togther rendering the efforts of segregation useless.

The prosperity Indians have seen in the last decade has made some them aware of the importance of this, but a lot still needs to be done. In a country of billion the amount of waste generated is humongous and we really need to put our minds together to tackle this problem. There are many by products that can give us good benefits, like pest control, containment of diseases like Malaria, we even can generate power from garbage these days.

I welcome the steps being taken by Chennai Corporation and I hope they sustain it. Hopefully the money being collected will be used to improve the infrastructure of the City. More then anything else I hope the people of Chennai take it to their heart and make it a practice for a cleaner Chennai and set an example for rest of India to follow.


Without self discipline we cannot raise above mediocrity.