What started as a one-time Sunday activity by five residents about six months ago at S.P. Nagar, near Thudiyalur, has today grown into full fledged residents’ activity on Sundays to improve the locality.
It has also led to the formation of a trust, ‘Restore Nature’, a WhatsApp group and resulted in the residents not just planting saplings, but maintaining the local park, composting their wet waste, managing dry waste, contemplating fixing CCTV cameras and setting up a bio-gas plant.
Tracing the developments in the past six-eight months, V. Sathish Balaji, a resident, said a few friends of his and he got down to the road on a Sunday morning to shift the bin that was overflowing and had turned into an open dump yard.
They shifted the bin closer to another one that was not far away and cleaned the place. This evoked positive response from the residents. But they did not stop with that. The team got back by building a proper bin with interlocking slabs to streamline the dumping of garbage.
One led to another as more appreciation and financial support also poured in. That was when the core team of people who took to the streets, decided to go in for segregated waste collection. When the team took it up with residents, cooperation was easy to come by for they had already earned a good name.
E. Yogesh Raja, another resident, said the team members told the residents about dry and wet (kitchen) waste, the importance of segregation and how they planned to dispose of those. The residents immediately agreed and what began in a small measure at S.P. Nagar had now spread to Poompuhar Nagar, V.K.L. Nagar, Park Avenue, Hill View Nagar, Kalpana Gardens, Balaji Nagar, V.R.V. Nagar and V.C.S. Nagar.
As the residents’ compliance increased, the core team decided to compost the wet waste at the locality, eliminating the need for Corporation to transport the waste. The residents used the compost they harvested from the compost pits to manure the saplings they had planted as part of the green drive. As the saplings grew so did the residents participation and the number of members in the ‘Restoring Nature’ WhatsApp group. And, as residents’ contribution increased, the organisation morphed into a trust with proper accounting procedures.
Today, the residents had planned to install a bio-gas plant to produce methane from wet waste and install CCTV cameras to make the area safe for women and children, said Mr. Balaji.
On seeing the residents cooperate among themselves, the children too got involved in that on their own volition, they had started undertaking awareness campaign among residents to ensure compliance to segregated waste collection practice.
“It was not something that the ‘Restoring Nature’ members taught the children, they did it on their own,” he said and added that the children were so dedicated that they water the saplings they had planted with the water they carry in bottles from school to home in the evenings.
R. Raveendran of Residents Awareness Association of Coimbatore said the RAAC had been hand held the ‘Restoring Nature’ trust in the initial days and provided technical inputs on segregated waste collection and compost pits.
