Vertical gardens line smart city drains

Visakhapatnam: Earlier, passersby had to turn their face, covering their nose while passing via drains in the smart city.

But some of the city drain stretches are no longer an eyesoar. In fact, they add to the list of beauty spots.

The Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation has embarked on ‘Eco Vizag’ on June 5, marking the ‘World Environment Day’. The campaign focuses on five key principles such as eco-clean, eco-green, eco-blue, eco-zero plastic and eco-zero pollution.

Keeping the monsoon season in view, the civic body is giving preference to the ‘eco-green’ parameter of the campaign.

Targeting on two aspects such as discouraging people from dumping waste into the drains and beautifying the stretch, the civic body intends to experiment with vertical gardening along the drain stretches. “Apparently, we are coming with one more campaign. In addition to focusing on horizontal greenery, we are also promoting vertical gardening. On an experimental basis, already some parts of the city drains have been identified for developing vertical gardens. In the days to come, this concept will be taken forward quite aggressively,” explains CM Saikanth Varma, GVMC Commissioner.

Eye-pleasing vertical gardens and green screens have been set up at Rushikonda, Sagar Nagar and MVP Colony and other localities. Based on their sustainability, more such spots would be developed by the corporation in future. A lot of stress was also given to upcycling plastic caps and other stuff to beautify the city drains. At Sagar Nagar alone, a caption ‘clean our sea plastic-free’ was readied making use of 50,000 plastic bottle caps.

‘Green my Street’

Innovatively, in tune with the Eco Vizag, trees that would be developed into canopies are being proposed in the colony streets. A drive has commenced in this regard and ‘Green my Street’ challenge has been rolled out towards this direction. With the support of the secretariat staff, a survey would be carried out to check on the possibility of growing canopies in the streets of various neighbourhoods. So far, 10,000 such canopy trees were identified by the civic staff. Also, much priority is given to the trees that survive longer.