Tired of complaining, some Residents of South City 1 decided enough was enough and went on a rampage against littered streets, piles of rubbish, heaps of horticulture waste and the like.
One such endeavour has been spearheaded by Deepak Sharma, a resident of Silokhra Village, who mustered the resources of the MCG and got the Horticulture and Sanitation Department to deploy forces to bring down the mini Landfill that had come up near the STP plant along the service lane of our colony. To begin with, this was a pile of dried leaves but soon it began to boast of mixed waste including plastic sheets, tattered clothing, food packets, plastic crockery and cutlery, pillows, shoes and even long coils of electric wiring.
The JCB detailed for the job was happy enough to bury all of the mixed waste into the bowels of the earth but we managed to impress upon the MCG personnel present, and Jamshed, the man handling the JCB, that doing this would only serve as a good optic. On the contrary, it would lead to severe contamination of the soil and groundwater as was happening at the Bandhwari Landfill. We would just be prescribing our own and our family’s slow death on account of poisoning due to the toxins emanating from the buried mixed waste.
It took a lot of cajoling and some rounds of cold water, tea and “shikanjvi” to get the Labour to segregate the mixed waste from the horticulture waste. Even to get them started on the job, Deepak had to call the relevant Supervisors several times. The work started on the 23rd of June 2023 and got completed in four days. The rains had dampened its pace somewhat, but not our spirits. Satjit Singh Dhillon (G 96) also sweated it out alongside us. To quote Ashwani Duggal (GS of SCRWA), “We will not become great by posting on WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook. We need to sweat it out; all of us”
Besides this, Deepak has been working to put together a Market Association which will slowly but surely absolve the South City 1 market of the filth and litter that is present there. The beauty is that while being actively involved on the ground, he is harnessing the resources of the MCG. There are many other such ventures that the Residents of South City 1 have undertaken and since our small successes only serve to fuel the attempts of others, I would request people to reach out to me so that their triumphs get highlighted in our neighbourhood magazine, Samvada.
One step at a time, we will surely get to the point when we can reclaim the once beautiful South City 1, where we chose to live.
by Dr Savita Nagpal (B 86 South City1)
