Khanna to be first garbage-free town in Punjab

Khanna, famous for being Asia’s biggest grain market, will be made the first garbage-free town in the state at a cost of Rs 4 crore. This has been announced by the state government.

To achieve this goal, the government on Monday launched a pilot project, under which the waste will be collected, segregated door to door and later, segregated at a plant in Khanna.

The pilot project, which will be replicated across the state after its success in Khanna, would run for

a year.

Launching the project, Cabinet Minister Tarunpreet Singh said the Punjab Government was striving to make the state garbage-free, for which a pilot project had been started in Khanna.

He said wet and dry garbage/solid waste would be collected separately from every household in every ward of Khanna.

He said with the commencement of the project, waste would not be dumped at any other point of Khanna, and in the process, garbage dumps would be eliminated from all wards of Khanna.

He said under the project, the residential/commercial/street vendors of Khanna would be issued a unique identification number, which would be linked to a mobile application.

A nominal bill for garbage collection would be sent to each user on their mobile phone through a message, he added. The minister further said that the city residents could pay the user charges in both online and offline modes.

He said a complaint cell had also been set up in this regard, for which the toll free number, 1800-121-5721, had been made functional. He said any complaint regarding garbage received on the number would be processed within 60 minutes. He also said there all vehicles collecting garbage would be tracked on the GPS. The details of all these vehicles will be displayed live on the screen of the control room set up for the purpose.

Singh said his dream was to make Khanna clean and beautiful.

He said after the success of the project, it would be replicated not only in the entire state but also in other states of India.

“Through this project, fertilisers will be made from wet waste and electricity will be generated from plastic waste,” he said.

He has appealed to the residents of Khanna to make this project successful in order to achieve the goal of making Khanna garbage-free.