Art of Living (AoL) founder Sri Sri Ravi Shankar on Wednesday said the clean-up of the Yamuna floodplains where the World Culture Festival was organised last week will take about a month.
He visited the floodplains to inspect the ongoing cleanliness drive before leaving for Bengaluru.
The Yamuna floodplains played host to his three-day cultural gala, which saw thousands of artistes performing and lakhs of visitors thronging the venue.
The event was marred by controversy with the green brigade taking AoL to court over the alleged ecological damage caused to the fragile ecosystem of the Yamuna floodplain because of the event.
In a statement released by AoL on Wednesday, the Foundation claimed a Delhi-based recycling start-up -- POM POM -- has joined them as their recycling partner and will be responsible for collecting the garbage from the venue to ensure that it gets recycled and does not end up at landfill.
“Pom Pom has already collected 22 truckloads of recyclables and a lot more is anticipated to be collected. The collected recyclables will be forwarded to factories which uses these as raw material,” the AoL said.
An AoL spokesperson added that the cleanliness drive will be carried out for a month and this has got the environmentalists more worried. “It is a fact that the longer human activity happens in the fragile ecosystem the greater will be the damage. While we aren’t sure of how long AoL has the permission to use this site, we also can’t understand why this floodplain can’t be left alone,’’ said environmentalist Anand Arya.
The AoL explained that Mr. Ravi Shankar inspected the cleaning operations at the venue and instructed the teams on further course of action for the next one month.
According to the AoL, five agencies were assigned the task of housekeeping and cleaning, garbage collection and removal, dustbin dissemination, mobile toilets and mosquito fumigation.
Meanwhile, farmers at the Yamuna floodplains complained that garbage is being removed only from specific places at the venue and demanded that the entire site be cleaned up.
