Residents have decided to take up brooms for a spick-and-span festive season.
The prolonged delay in the execution of the solid-waste management project under the Centre-sponsored Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission has frustrated the residents. Some of them have decided to take the initiative to usher in sanitation before the Puja, Diwali and Chhath. The outbreak of the dengue in the city has spurred them on.
“We don’t want to welcome goddess Durga with filth on our doorsteps. The inability of the Patna Municipal Corporation (PMC) to remove garbage from the streets when dengue cases are on the rise has left no option for us than to clean our neighbourhood on our own,” said Raghunandan Prasad, the secretary of Magistrate Colony Co-operative Society.
Prasad claimed that the co-operative would be hiring few scavengers for two to three days to make the streets spick-and-span. The co-operative already pays Rs 60 per house to a private agency for door-to-door collection of garbage.
Residents of four houses along roads number 22 and 23 at SK Nagar have a similar plan. “The road in front of my house has turned into a garbage dump. People from nearby areas dump garbage here. But nothing has been done. So, we are planning to do levelling of the road by putting debris and soil over it for the Puja,” said Madhuri Sinha, a resident of the area.
“There are children in my house and I am worried about their safety because of the dengue outbreak. Though fogging has started recently in my area, the garbage removal is still an issue. We are planning to get garbage heaps removed from around our houses during Puja,” said Amit Keshav, a Kankerbagh resident. He added: “It would not only take care of the sanitation problem but also check breeding of the dengue mosquitoes.”
Co-operative societies, however, can’t take care of everything. Many empty plots in the Magistrate Colony are still full of stagnant water. Prasad, the secretary of the co-operative, said: “It is the responsibility of the PMC to pump out the water.”
PMC commissioner Kuldip Narayan claimed tenders for the solid waste management project would be floated by the end of this week. The project was approved by ministry of urban development on March 28, 2007, for an estimated outlay of Rs 36.95 crore.
