The recent floods in the affected districts have left local administration authorities grappling with the challenge of disposing tons of waste dumped on the streets.
In Chennai, the corporation, whose resources have been stretched to capacity, had called for volunteers and staff from other municipal corporations unaffected by floods to help clean up the waste, which includes the sludge left behind by retreating waters, e-wastes, industrial and domestic rubbish.
Tonnes of household material had to be discarded after the waters destroyed them, and residents could only dump the goods outside their own homes. The need of the hour is that volunteers, who received plaudits for providing, distributing and donating relief material to victims of floods in different parts of the city, work in tandem with the administration in cleaning up the waste. But, volunteers have been difficult to find.
A corporation official said that they required more volunteers to complete the task. “Volunteers have contributed significantly, but we definitely need more support,” official said.
Amid the mess, one scarcely heard the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan campaign, a favourite of the Prime Minister, being invoked. What better time than post floods for the cleaning up campaign to swing into action and prove the basic idea for which it was started. When it was launched, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan campaign inspired spontaneous participation from people of all walks of life — movie stars, IT professionals, lawyers and others. The government chose ambassadors for the campaign hoping that they would take on the mission and by example, inspire and lead others into paying attention to keep the surroundings clean. It was expected that the same would happen now.
And at this point of time, all eyes were on the state unit of the BJP, the initiator of the scheme, to lead the way in Tamil Nadu. When asked whether the BJP could have taken the lead, senior party leader L. Ganesan said that they were already involved in cleaning up activities. “We are already there in flood-affected areas. We are doing our best,” he said.
Disagreeing with the point of view that the lukewarm response from civil society for waste clearance stressed the limits of the national campaign, he said that 25 young volunteers had been allocated to every constituency and would start their work on Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s birthday on December 25. “This is a BJP initiative. Instead of convening party meeting, we will do the cleaning. Obviously, we could have done more, but I think we have done our best,” Mr. Ganesan added.
Arun Krishnamurthy of Environmentalist Foundation of India said that the floods had shown the limits of volunteering-based cleaning operations. “While we are very passionate, one must not forget that cleaning up massive amounts of waste requires hard labour which most of us are not used to. We are also susceptible to infections, if we don't take the right precautions. But there is a co-ordinated way to go about it,” he said.
While Kamal Haasan, this city’s chosen ambassador for the Swachh Bharat campaign, got involved in November last year in cleaning up the Madambakkam lake, the relief and clean up act this time around is being taken care of by his fan associations, its representatives have claimed.
The efforts of other volunteers who were on the field have to be acknowledged. However, urban experts wonder if an existing scheme specifically designed towards hygiene and sanitation could not have been utilised, especially in Chennai, to take on the tremendous challenges the floods threw up.
There were many hands to help, but, as one Chennai Corporation official put it, Chennai could do with more for now.
