Painting the town pink to foster communal harmony

Patna: A district headquarters town in the central Bihar, badly affected by Naxalite and other unlawful activities, has been painted pink with the hope it will drive extremists and criminals away and promote communal amity.

The town in the Naxalite-infested Aurangabad district was painted with uniform pink colour a fortnight back on the orders of the district administration.

The logic behind this peculiar initiative, officials assert, is that it will foster brotherhood in this communally and criminally-sensitive town and check violent activities bleeding the district white for over two decades.

Motto

The other city associated with this colour is Jaipur, also called the "Pink City", located in the historic western Indian state Rajasthan though not with the same motto. It was done primarily to make Jaipur look beautiful.

"We decided to paint the city pink after getting consents of all the citizens with the sole motto that the same will foster communal amity in the society and keep a check on the unlawful activities that have bled the region white for over two decades," the Aurangabad district magistrate Birendra Bahadur Pandey said.

The brainchild of this initiative is the sub-divisional officer (SDO) Arvind Kumar Singh, second to the District Magistrate, who brought the matter at a meeting of the Town Development Council held recently.

"Everyone appreciated my idea and decided to seek consent from the local citizens before we went ahead with the plan... The local citizens accepted it gladly", informed the SDO.

According to the SDO, the main motto of the official campaign is "Pink Aurangabad, Green Auranga-bad; Clean Aurangabad, Discipline Aurangabad".

"We requested the local citizens to raise funds at their own level to paint the city pink, launch massive green plantation in the township, keep it clean by voluntarily removing all the illegal encroachments and discipline themselves and the response was tremendous," the SDO added.

Message

"Within a fortnight of this message conveyed to them, almost 70 per cent of the city dwellings and shopping complexes were painted with pink at their own level. We did nothing else except exploiting their sentiments saying that we all are one," he said.

Some 90,000 population reside in the Aurangabad town and there more than over 1,000 shops located there, according to an official report.