The swift cleaning up of the capital city’s roads after Attukal Pongala, which used to be a surprise years ago, has now turned into an expectation. The Thiruvananthapuram Corporation’s legion of sanitation workers lived up to that expectation on Sunday, removing much of the waste from the public spaces within hours of the conclusion of the festivities.
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Mayor Arya Rajendran, Health Standing Committee Chairperson Gayathri Babu and other Corporation officials inaugurated the cleaning activities near the Attukal Temple at 2.30 p.m., soon after the devotees started returning home. The major thoroughfares were cleaned up within a couple of hours. By late evening, the sanitation workers removed over a hundred truck loads of waste from the city’s streets.
The drastic reduction in the amount of plastic or paper cups and plates due to strict enforcement of green protocol made the cleaning up easier. The civic body had appealed to the devotees to bring their own plates and tumblers to avoid littering. Yet, in a few areas, paper cups and other materials were seen piled up on the road.
More than 2,000 sanitation workers and over a hundred supervisory officials were part of the clean-up efforts spanning almost half the area of the capital city. Volunteers from various organisations helped the civic body in collecting the bricks left behind by the devotees. The bricks will be used for the Corporation’s housing schemes for the poor, as done in the previous years. The main thoroughfare from Secretariat to East Fort was washed down on Sunday night.