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| Students at Ricards Lodge High School in London remove garbage from Vivekananda Park on Sunday morning. (Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya) |
School students from London on Sunday lent their hands to clean a park in the city that the chief minister wants to turn into London, wondering why bins had not been installed to keep the premises clean.
Students of city schools who have been cleaning Vivekananda Park on weekends for a month have found that the green patch on Southern Avenue returns to it usual dirty state over the week.
On Sunday, the city students were joined by eight Year IX (equivalent to Class VIII) girls from Ricards Lodge High School in Wimbledon, who are in the city under an exchange programme.
To the visitors, the problem clearly was the lack of dustbins. “We could not spot dustbins in the park. If there were bins, I do not think it would take much of an effort to drop garbage in them rather than litter all over,” said Daisy Zealey, one of the visiting students.
The civic body is passing the buck to the Calcutta Improvement Trust (CIT), which has recently been merged with the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA).
“The corporation will take over the park but it now belongs to the CIT. We cannot install things in the park before the takeover. Once the transfer takes place, we will not just place bins but also revamp the park,” claimed Chaitali Chattopadhyay, the Trinamul Congress councillor of ward 90.
The CMDA promised to install bins in the park in less than a month. “We have placed an order for 800 plastic bins. Some of them have been installed at Rabindra Sarobar. We will soon install bins at Vivekananda Park,” said Vivek Bharadwaj, the CEO of CMDA.
The student’s attempt to clean the park in a locality full of high-rise buildings has failed to rouse residents from their slumber.
“It is a shame that kids from a different country cleaned the park but the residents did not care enough to help them. We began this a month back but apart from the students, nobody else stepped in to turn this ripple into a wave,” said environment activist Mudar Patherya, who started the drive with a group of students from Modern High School for Girls.
“It is the first visit of the Wimbledon girls to India and our city but instead of taking them around, we are involving them in the clean-up drive. It is shameful but we had to do it and the best part is that they did not mind,” said Alifia Yusufi, a Class VIII student at MSB Educational Institute who was a part of Sunday’s drive.
The state of the park was a “shock” for the visitors. “We have not cleaned parks at home. The local government employs people to do the job,” said Imogen Speight, another UK student.
“We thought if residents see students from abroad cleaning their park, they might at least keep their surroundings clean even if they do not join our drive,” said Yusuf Sonaseth, International School Award co-ordinator at MSB.
Students of The Heritage School, La Martiniere for Girls and Boys, Mahadevi Birla Girls’ Higher Secondary School and Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy have also taken part in the drive to clean the park in the run-up to Vivekananda’s 150th birth anniversary.
Those who are part of the drive still hope to find a way to keep the park clean.
“We have pooled in money from some residents and traders and employed a person to clean the park daily. If we can raise more money, we will employ two people. We have a meeting with the CMDA and hope to get a fence erected and lights installed soon,” said Patherya.
