June 18, the proposed date for the revised Guinness Record attempt by the Coimbatore Corporation and a few organisations, is just a week away. But there is very little indication on the ground to suggest that the Corporation is going ahead as planned.
The Corporation and the organisations involved were supposed to attempt a litter collection drive involving as many as two lakh persons, to beat the record held under this head by a Japanese city.
First proposed in December 2014-January 2015, the Corporation had planned for the litter collection drive involving school and college students at over 40 collection points in each of the five zones. And, each collection point was to have 1,000 students.
But at the eleventh hour, the civic body called off the event by only saying that the Android app developed for recording the data was not yet ready and did not have the Guinness World Record committee’s approval.
The truth, though, was poor planning led to the failure.
Then the civic body officials had said that they would make the second attempt in the second week of June as by then the schools and colleges would have reopened and that the students would be roped in as volunteers. In announcing the new date, the officials also said that by then all the ground work would have been done and that the Corporation would be ready to attempt the record.
But as things stand today, the Corporation seems to having a rethink on the very category under which it wants to attempt the record. Officials familiar with the record attempt said that the Corporation had written to the Guinness World Record Committee saying if it could make the attempt for having involved the maximum number of people in segregated collection of waste and not involving the maximum number of people for litter collection.
The civic body is yet to receive a response to this proposal, though.
Without an approval from the committee the Corporation would not be in a position to go ahead and plan its operations. Plus, it needs at least 30 days to ask the committee to send its adjudicators to monitor the record attempt. This means the event will not be on at least till the second week of July this year, the officials point out.
And, at stake here is the Rs. 5.75 lakh paid to the committee for the record attempt.
