The seventh most populous city of Karnataka, Bellary, is on its way to becoming a ‘Clean and Green City’, looking at the way a dedicated team of 600 pourakarmikas are going all out to make it clean, green, wastefree and spotless. In an exclusive conversation with the Municipal Commissioner of Bellary, Ms.Preeti Gehlot (IAS), Indian Masterminds tried to know from her about the many campaigns launched by the administration to achieve the set targets under the Swachh Bharat Mission, which was launched in 2014 with the aim of making India open defecation free and clean.
TEAM ON A MISSION
Since 2014, around 4000 cities of India have been working towards achieving the goal of Clean and Green City and various steps and awareness campaigns have been initiated by city corporations for the same. The city of Bellary too joined the fray and started its own campaigns to achieve the tag. The team which has been working day and night towards this aim comprises of around 600 pourakarmikas, basically sanitary workers.
Explaining the project structure in detail, Ms. Preeti Gehlot said, “Our pourakarmikas are basically regular and contract-based employees who wake up everyday at 5 am in the morning, clean the streets and collect the waste. They include around 300 women sanitary workers. The health section is headed by health officer Mr Hanumantappa. Then, we have two environmental engineers Mr Srinivas and Mr Avinash ,12 health inspectors,each inspector looking after 3 to 4 wards. Bellary city has 39 wards, and 39 supervisors are deployed in each ward.”
True success comes only with people’s participation and to motivate the public to join the campaign, an appealing video has been released by the city corporation. Here is the link:
Green and Clean Ballari city Campaign
SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT
The Green and Clean Bellary Mission is based mainly on solid waste management and waste segregation. Ms. Gehlot elaborated: “Our aim is to collect 100% waste by door-to-door collection. The Municipal Corporation recently bought around 150 waste collection vehicles for this purpose. We started waste segregation in our 4 wards on a pilot project basis. Now around 90% waste is being segregated and the same process has started in other wards too. Multiple awareness programs have also started like waste management, composting at house level, composting at community levels, stopping single use plastic with the collaboration of City Municipal Corporation and a local NGO.” The link to the waste management campaign:
BLACK SPOT REMOVAL
Black spots are those places or corners of the city where people usually throw or dump their waste. Ms. Gehlot said, “We are detecting such spots and people around there to tell them to give their wastes only to waste collecting vehicles. By leveraging penalties and planting trees on such spots, we are trying to reduce such spots. In the last 10 months, lot of improvement have been seen in the city.”
The Commissioner also informed that they are tying up with medical agencies for the incineration of medical wastes such as sanitary pads, diapers, hospital waste etc. The corporation is also promoting composting at household level by using vacant land,
“We have installed 20 to 30 pits from our side at different locations so that when wet waste is collected, it can be managed in these pits rather than sending it to landfill sites,” she added.
CALENDAR OF EVENTS
In 2019, Bellary city got 345th rank in the Swachh Bharat Mission. Since then, the city has seen a lot of improvement in terms of solid waste management.And this has been possible because of the efforts of the city municipal corporation and the cooperation of the public. In January this year, the first Calendar of Events was released where scheduled weekly activities at public spots were marked.
The officer said, “We selected specific themes before 2nd October for around 6 weeks. The themes were plastic waste removal, construction waste removal, plastic raids, mask penalties, etc. We also installed dustbins and public toilets in different areas, and every evening from 7 to 10 pm, our team goes for plastic raids in some random places. With the help of the people, the plantation of around 6000 saplings was also done across the city.”
The new calendar for the next two months is to be released on 26November. Here also, various activities like door-to-door campaigns in different colonies, street plays, waste separation management campaigns, recycling and reuse mechanism of plastic waste awareness programs are scheduled for every Friday.
ABOUT THE CITY
Bellary was on the map of the first Indian commercial flight from Karachi to Madras on 15th October 1932 by JRD Tata. The city is mainly famous for its cotton and garment industry with 260 denim garment units providing employment to nearly 3000 families. A city with urban population of around 4.77 lakh people which releases around 170-180 tons of average waste daily.Various stakeholders from slums to elite classes are now coming forward and joining hands with the city corporation to fulfill the pledge of making their Bellary green and clean again.
