Citizens unite to clean city

Photographer Subashini Vanangamudi was appalled at the amount of trash left behind on the beaches of ECR, close to her residence. “There was so much garbage – acid bottles, plastic, household items, glass and even carcass of dead animals. If unattended, this would surely lead to an outbreak of diseases. So, a few friends and I started cleaning the beach on Tuesday. We were pleasantly surprised when morning walkers joined us. There were 20 of us, wearing boots and gloves, and we collected close to 30 bags of trash, which we asked the Corporation to help us dispose. We were able to cover only half of the Neelankarai beach. We plan to continue this initiative,” she says.

Members of the Jamaat e Islami Hind too have been actively cleaning up various parts of the city over the past few days. “More than 120 volunteers have been doing clean-up operations in Saidapet, Kotturpuram, Ennore and many other places. We cleaned up as many houses as we could, salvaged whatever household utensils that could be used. While we were cleaning up the mosque, we saw a temple which had a lot of debris and we cleaned it too. We have limited resources and this is the best we could do,” explains Shabbir Ahmed, the State President of Jamaat e Islami Hind. 

Volunteers, who have been carrying out relief operations, point out that since most of the material has been packed in plastic, this is only adding to gar¬bage piling up. Akhila Phadnis, a volunteer, says they have come up with a plan to tackle the rising trash levels. 

“A lot of plastic waste is generated and we started asking our volunteers to collect the previous day’s trash, after they have distributed the relief materials. 

Our teams in Perungalathur and Madipakkam have already started collecting the disposed materials. This way, we don’t add to the garbage. We are setting up collection points across the city, where the garbage can be segregated,” she explains.