GWMC campaigns with rangoli

GWMC adopts innovative methods to educate public in ensuring cleanliness in Warangal city

Warangal: This Sankranti season sanitation workers of Greater Warangal Municipal Corporation (GWMC) are busy drawing ‘muggu’ (rangoli) at colonies in the city, but with a different purpose.

The purpose is to prevent littering of streets. The workers are visiting the streets early in the morning scouting for locations to draw rangolis. The locations they are picking out are the public places, where the residents are dropping the garbage.

After pinpointing the location, the workers are sprucing up the place by lifting the waste and then drawing a multi-coloured rangoli pattern with a message ‘chetta veyaradu’ (Don’t drop litter). The residents are left with no other option but to look for a nearby dust bin to drop the household waste.

The campaign is taken up by the corporation’s public health wing at the directions of the city Mayor and the Municipal Commissioner as part of the corporations’ efforts to score better in the ongoing ‘Swachh Sarvekshan’ survey-2018.

“We aim to educate the public to quit the habit of dropping waste on the roads or in the streets. The campaign, launched a couple of days ago, is well received by the residents in the colonies,” the Municipal Health Officer Bommana Raja Reddy told The Hans India on Sunday.

The corporation has adopted a multi-pronged approach towards achieving cleanliness in the city. The initiative was taken up not just for scoring well in the Swachh Sarvekshan survey, but is meant to develop healthy practices among the citizens as littering streets will eventually be harming them.

The campaign will be conducted continuously in all the municipal wards in the city, he said adding the same approach is being adopted to prevent throwing litter at vacant plots in the colonies and to prevent open defecation at such places.

The GWMC has also been putting up green and blue plastic dustbins attached to metal stands for segregation of wet and dry waste at commercial locations and along the main roads, where dumber bins cannot be placed. It is planned to put up 300 such dust bins in the city, he noted.

The works related to installing underground dustbins at six places in the first phase in nearing completion and they will be available for the public use from Tuesday onwards. Each dustbin can hold about 600 to 800 kilos of garbage and hydraulic trucks will be used to lift the garbage.

Mayor Nannapuneni Narender said the Corporation is distributing five lakh dust bins, two each to 2,50,000 households under the GWMC limits for collecting wet and dry waste separately. The sanitation workers moving on pushcarts will collect them. These efforts are aimed at keeping the entire city clean and ensure better health of the citizens, he added.

James Edwin