The country’s most ‘swachh’ city by rank, Mysuru, was turned into a sprawling garbage dump within a few hours.
The Mysuru Palace, and the four-kilometre route of the ''Jamboo Savari'', the elephant procession that is the piece de resistance of the Dasara festival, were on Tuesday turned into a giant trash bin, filled with tonnes of waste – empty plastic water bottles, used paper plates and cups, and food packaging.
Dasara enthusiasts tossing the trash behind them did not spare even the hallowed Durbar Hall of the Amba Vilas Palace. It was all too much for the scion of the Mysuru royal family, Yaduveer Krishnadatta Chamaraja Wadiyar, and he took to a microblogging website to criticise the offenders.
“We cannot take our cleanest city tag seriously when the very icon of our city is treated in this manner,” he said, sharing a picture of the littered Durbar Hall of the Palace on Instagram.
“When will the people understand that the Palace Durbar Hall is not a theatre. Never has anyone at any point been allowed to consume food at the Durbar hall, let alone throw around their trash like some theatre (Not that we should throw trash around in a theatre),” he lamented, before concluding his post expressing the hope that the “blatant disregard to our most sacred building is not an annual feature.”
The civic authorities, though, were not wholly unprepared. The Mysuru City Corporation (MCC) has contract workers to cart the waste away during the 11 day-long festival that draws thousands of tourists, including foreigners.
“Teams of personnel from a total of 280 work in shifts to clear the trash. They work overnight,” says Dr. Ramachandra, MCC's Health Officer. Volunteers of NGO Naren Foundation and students of Mahajana’s College joined the clean-up on Wednesday.
“We cleared about 20 tonnes,” said Dr. Nagaraj, Health Officer, MCC.
A day before Vijaya Dashami, farmers “left behind mounds of unsold ash gourd and banana plants to be cleared by the MCC units.”
