Swachh Faridkot campaign starts with public education

Balwant Garg

Tribune News Service

Faridkot, February 16

The district administration has organised a seminar at Guru Gobind Singh Medical College, urging the people to use the organic matter in the trash to produce rich topsoil for the plants and kitchen gardening.

Addressing people, Dr Puran Singh, project director, Punjab Municipal Infrastructure Development and in-charge of the Swachh Punjab Mission, said, “Let’s start segregating our dry waste from wet waste, which makes composting possible. The precious wet waste, which can be used as a potentially black gold, remains without any use, just filling our landfills.”

He said the cleanliness drive started from a house with three main principles which include no-open defecation, management of solid waste and proper disposal and management of waste water. Avoid mixing our food waste with our recyclable waste like paper, plastic, metal as this missing make even our recyclable waste less recoverable, he said.

With the segregation of garbage, we can help the municipalities in keeping our city clean and garbage free with its composting, said Lalit Mohan Pathak, president Nagar Council Nawan Shahar who also reached Faridkot to share his experience with the residents in the town, how Nawanshahar got the 50th rank in the country in its cleanliness level.

Dr Puran Singh said composting was a simple process of breaking down the organic matter (food waste) in the presence of air and water, using micro organisms and small insects present in nature. The end product is called compost, which is rich in readily usable plant nutrients forming a part of healthy soil.

Rajeev Prashar, Deputy Commissioner, Faridkot, said as a prelude to encouraging cities to improve urban sanitation, Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs had conducted ‘Swachh Survekshan-2016’ survey for the rating of 73 cities in January 2016 followed by ‘Swachh Survekshan-2017’ conducted in January-February 2017 ranking 434 cities. In a bid to scale up the coverage of the ranking exercise and encourage towns and cities to actively implement mission initiatives in a timely and innovative manner, MoHUA has now started a third survey to rank all 4,041 cities based on assessment of progress from January 4, 2018, till March 10 under the Swachh Bharat Mission.