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CLEANLINESS IS RESPONSIBILITY OF ALL

Young Bites. Dated: 2/21/2020 10:44:47 AM

There is no strict law and punishment in India for dumping the garbage anywhere. So, the people here take it for granted and keep dumping where ever they feel like. Since the people here do not consider the public places as a part of their property, so they think that it’s not their responsibility to keep the premises clean. But if someone makes their private property untidy, they would yell at them, won’t they? In India we do have a big system to ensure cleanliness. But the question is, where are we failing? Cleanliness should be the fundamental responsibility of every Indian. A collective responsibility actually means no one is held responsible individually. So a system should be created where every citizen is held personally responsible for failing to keep his/her premises clean. Accountability is the one thing which is lacking in India with regards to cleanliness. There is no awareness among citizens that they have to play their part in cooperating with their city’s municipal corporation to keep their premises clean. Cleanliness workshops should be undertaken by the government authorities to educate people about their roles and responsibilities in keeping their premises clean. We Indians actually never treat our streets and colonies as we do our homes. We very well know how to keep our houses clean and we do keep them clean. But at what cost? It’s at the expense of making our streets and roadsides unclean by disposing debris there. Cleanliness is a self sustaining system. The system is available and working successfully in some of the western countries. Why western countries are so clean? Does each citizen go on the roads wielding brooms and collecting debris? No. They have a cleaning system and everybody by law is held responsible to follow that system. Some of the activities of a self-sustaining cleanliness system are: Cities are held responsible to create and maintain a realistic infrastructure for waste collection, transportation, storage, tracking. Infrastructure in this context means any waste coming out of private/public properties, garbage bins, debris transporter trucks, contractor standards, disposal yards, tracking systems, etc. This can successfully take care of 95% of the problem. With changing lifestyle each individual generates more and more waste with each coming year. So every citizen receives training about his/her obligations towards cleanliness in schools to how to manage/dispose waste generated by them. City administration concentrates on successful collection of wastes Each individual/public & private entities will be held financially responsible for managing the waste generated by them. All the finances will be quarterly directly billed to the residents of the city as per their share of waste, just like we get water bill in India. Municipal corporations will maintain a fleet of trucks, disposal yards, waste processing plants and so on with this money. Private companies participate in waste management activities like collection, transportation, dump site management, etc. If India wants this to become a self-sustaining system, then cleanliness must not be given as a choice where people clean their premises just once when they feel like it and that too for a facebook photo stunt, but it must become a law with proper definition of responsibilities/accountability/duties/ breaches/penalties. The 'Swachh Bharat' campaign launched nationwide focuses on sanitation, hygiene and waste management, but as responsible citizen, we all have to contribute to make Bharat Swachh.