Chennai
In a bid to clean up villages and to ensure that rural communities were ‘open defecation-free’ (ODF), the government thought up the idea of environment protectors. It was first a pilot project in 2,000 of the state’s 12,554 village panchayats in 2014-15. The government was taken aback when other villages started demanding the same in their areas resulting in another 7,000 habitations being covered this financial year.
This scheme was dovetailed with the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) and participants were paid under this scheme for the first 100 days after which they were paid by the Tamil Nadu government’s Solid Waste Management Funds, payment being made to the concerned self-help groups (SHG) and not to individuals.
Scheme members undergo two days training in their respective villages and are given luminescent clothes and gloves by the district administration. A tricycle or pushcart is provided for every 150 houses. The environment protectors collect domestic garbage and segregate them into degradable and non-degradable sections. Each habitation has three pits, two for degradable garbage as its volume is higher and the third pit for non-degradable trash.
Plastic is collected from garbage by environment protectors and sold to SHGs which specialise in using the plastic to lay roads, officials said. A day’s wage of Rs 183 is given when 40 kilograms rubbish is collected. Lesser garbage collection leads to proportionate reduction in wages, officials added. To avoid malpractices, signatures have to be collected from the first and last house in every street, and also from the village poverty reduction committee (VPRC) and SHG representatives. The village panchayat president then countersigns it.
The success of the scheme is gauged from the fact that Rural Development teams from Rajasthan, Telengana and Andhra Pradesh have visited Tamil Nadu to learn from the experts while a Union government team is camping in Thanjavur district to learn more about the success of the scheme. With nearly 50,000 persons being involved in this scheme, the Tamil Nadu government plans to extend it to other habitations in phases in the ensuing year.
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