Plant pots placed around Patna garbage points to help beautify city

Patna: The Patna Municipal Corporation, in a unique initiative, is placing plant pots at garbage dumping points to beautify the state capital and give it an attractive look.

The capital city with a number of tourist and religious spots has been attracting a large number of visitors every year.

Officials said the move would discourage city residents from littering in areas, along the roads and city streets.

According to municipal officials, Patna releases around 1,300 metric tonnes of waste every day. The major sources of wastes are city hotels, restaurants, malls, supermarkets, industries and factories, apart from the common households.

Although the municipal corporation has currently engaged 7,669 municipal staffs and 800 garbage vans to collect wastes from various wards of the state capitals, there are fairly large numbers of habitual offenders who love to dump garbage in public in total disregard of existing laws and official’s requests.

During the lockdown period, city’s waste collection had come down to half but post lockdown, waste generation has reached the previous level once again.

Flower pots

Patna municipal commissioner Himanshu Sharma said he had asked all the ward councillors to identify the garbage dumping points in all the state capital and decorate them with plant and flower pots. “Although we have asked the officials to prepare this list, we have already begun converting the garbage dumping points into green zones,” the municipal commissioner told the media on Monday.

The authorities have also announced to collect a hefty fine from the persons caught dirtying the public streets. “Anyone caught littering the garbage will be fined up to Rs500,” the municipal commissioner said and advised the citizens to hurriedly alert the municipal commission if they noticed people dumping garbage in the open.

Patna mayor Sita Sahu said the initiative would not only make the city clean but would only keep it free from germs. Of late, the dengue cases have shot up alarmingly and the officials hope to contain them by initiating such measure.

“We are repeatedly requesting the residents to keep the city clean saying that is in their interests but they just refuse to listen to our appeal. This is everyone’s responsibility to keep the city clean,” Patna mayor Sahu said. According to her, the initiative will also end the mosquito menace which has resulted in sudden spurt in dengue cases across the state.

Bihar has reported more than 350 dengue cases so far, of which 242 cases alone have been reported from Patna. As per the report, the dengue has struck a total of 11 districts so far. This has caused an additional problem for the health authorities who are already battling hard to contain the surging cases of coronavirus. According to an official report, COVID-19 has claimed 1,259 lives in Bihar, apart from infecting 235,159 people so far.