A massive exercise to clean up River Noyyal, conceptualised by Tirupur garment manufacturers, got off to a start here on Wednesday.
The drive was taken up on a nine km. stretch of the river passing through the cluster in which silt, plastic wastes and wildly grown shrubs would be removed so as to increase the water holding capacity and also make the river attain a clean look.
The activity would be in a way an image building exercise for the cluster which saw many setbacks due to the frequent pollution control norm violations.
“We are using eight earth movers to carry out the task against the initial plan of putting four machines into operation. This is to facilitate works completion within a fortnight against the earlier plan to complete in a month”, said Tirupur Exporters Association president Raja M. Shanmugam.
The member units of all industrial associations in the cluster would be collectively bear the expenditure of ₹ 30 lakh projected for the cleaning up exercise, which had the support of district administration. Since collective responsibility of different segments of society was essential to maintain the river clean for a longer period, the industrial associations had also taken up an awareness drive to tell the people staying on the banks not to dump wastes into the river anymore.
Earlier, Minister for Animal Husbandry Udumalai K. Radhakrishnan inaugurated the works in the presence of various MLAs and officials.
