A group of adolescent schoolgirls from Assam’s Nagaon district have proved that love is unconditional and all-encompassing: they declared that the Kolong river that flows nearby is their Valentine.
On Valentine’s Day (February 14), popularly known as the day of love, when young people profess love for one another and express it through catchy lovelorn slogans and gifts, nearly 150 schoolgirls from Nagaon Bengali Girls High School stood on the bank of the Kolong, which flows about a kilometre from their school, and declared their unconditional love for the river.
They renewed the pledge they had taken last year to love and care for the river, which is a tributary of the Brahmaputra.
The Kolong has become extremely polluted in the past few decades and efforts to restore its glory have been rendered futile because of the alleged lackadaisical attitude of the people and the administration.
The schoolgirls, who call themselves Green Police, are dedicated to environmental advocacy.
In the past few years, they have taken several cleanliness initiatives such as door-to-door campaign on clean drinking water, collecting water samples for testing, adopting an arterial road in front of their school for monitoring cleanliness, cleaning stretches of the banks of the Kolong, notifying manufacturing companies about their corporate social responsibility to collect and dispose of plastic packets of manufactured food products to prevent environmental hazards and writing to Prime Minister Narendra Modi about absence of toilets along national highways.
As a part of their latest initiative, the girls plan to take into confidence the people who dwell on the banks of the river. They will embark on community support mobilisation to take measures to curb further pollution and also to help a monitoring exercise to check the health of the river.
“This initiative is a renewal of the Valentine pledge the girls took last year. They have declared unconditional love for the Kolong and have promised to carry it forward. In 2017, on World Water Day on March 22, the Green Police had mobilised community participation and cleaned almost a kilometre of a bank of the Kolong,” said Nripendra Sarma, an engineer of the public health engineering department and mentor to the Green Police.
Formed in 2016 with 25 girls from the school, the Green Police is now a 150-strong environment brigade.