SRINAGAR: Cleaning of ‘Achan’, the municipal solid waste landfill in Srinagar, started after a solution was found to the city’s major waste-processing challenge, Commissioner and Secretary, Housing and Urban Development Department (H and UDD), Mandeep Kaur, said on Monday.
She expressed hope that the development would help Srinagar secure a place among the top three cleanest cities in the country within the next two years.
Speaking with reporters during an awareness programme on cleanliness, Kaur said waste collection in Srinagar was taking place effectively, but waste processing had become an “unmanageable” problem for the authorities, making it necessary to find a solution.
“If you compare Srinagar, waste collection is happening, but processing was one problem which had become unmanageable for us. It was necessary to find a solution to it. Thankfully, the solution has now been found and the cleaning of Achan has started,” she said.
“I hope that in two years, Srinagar will at least come in the top three,” she added.
Kaur stressed the need for citizens to adopt proper waste-management practices, including home composting, and take responsibility for keeping their homes and surroundings clean. “We can talk as much as we want about cleanliness, but nothing will change until we start from our own homes,” she said.
She said the government could spend thousands of crores on infrastructure, vehicles and waste-processing facilities, but such investments would not yield the desired results unless people changed their habits and maintained cleanliness around their homes.
“Even if we spend thousands of crores of rupees on constructing buildings, purchasing vehicles and creating processing facilities, nothing will change until we change the environment around our homes and keep our surroundings clean,” she said.
Referring to Srinagar’s sanitation workforce, Kaur said the Municipal Corporation had around 3,000 to 4,000 sanitation workers, while the city’s population was approximately 16 to 17 lakh. “Can such a small number of workers force everyone to maintain cleanliness? They cannot,” she said, urging citizens not to depend solely on municipal workers for sanitation.
She also called for collective efforts to reduce plastic use and promote home composting, besides creating “Swachhata warriors” in schools and homes to combat garbage and pollution.
“Tourists should not say that Jammu and Kashmir is very beautiful but dirty,” she said, stressing that cleanliness was essential to complement the region’s natural beauty.
Kaur said the Swachhata Internship Programme had been launched as a pilot project in Jammu to take the message of cleanliness to schoolchildren and encourage them to motivate their parents to maintain cleanliness beyond their homes.
She said greater public participation, along with improved waste processing, would be crucial to improving Srinagar’s cleanliness and helping the city achieve the desired ranking. (KNO)
