During the ongoing Ganesh festivities, the Andhra Pradesh National Green Corps (NGC) has initiated a new exercise involving college students to green rate the idols and pandals in the city with a set of parameters on eco-friendliness.
A total of fifty two teams of National Green Corps Prakrithi Mitra students from eight colleges have been constituted for the activity as part of which they will visit the Ganesh mandaps and check them against a list of eighteen key criteria to select the best eco-friendly celebrations.
“Each team will visit a minimum of 20 mandaps to scrutiny the details there and at the end of it, they will be green rated and prizes given for the most eco-friendly concepts and arrangements,” said APNGC Director W.G. Prasanna Kumar.
The teams comprise five Prakrithi Mitra students each and the participating institutions include Nizam College, University College of Science and S.P. College.
Checklist
The focus will be on the way the festival is conducted and the check list includes material used for the idol and decoration of the mandap, size of the idol, maintenance of hygiene, kind of illumination used, levels of plastic usage, material used for distribution of ‘prasad’ and noise levels from the sound systems installed there.
“The student teams will record the way puja material is disposed and whether flowers and such bio-degradable material is segregated or not,” he said.
Factors such as community participation and cooperation of the mandap organisers with the administration such as electricity board, police and others will also be used for the ranking.
Based on the collected inputs, the mandaps will get categorised as ‘Best’, ‘Good’, ‘Average’ and ‘Need Improvement’, and from each of the participating colleges, green rating and prizes would be given to three best eco-friendly celebrations.