Litter free Calicut

Today Calicut is going to be declared as India's first litter free city, reports The Indian Express. Noted author and social critic Sukumar Azhikode will make the declaration.

The change, [however], is for real. Gone are the odious heaps of fly-infested trash, even the eyesore public rubbish bins. No one throws garbage out anymore, or need to. Thanks to an initiative that has caught the fancy of much of the city population, smartly uniformed young women arrive driving specially designed cargo autorickshaws at each city home, shop and office every morning, picking up the garbage. Every home has been given two covered containers—a white one for plastics and other non-biodegradable wastes, green for other trash.

Together, the 730-odd trained women belonging to local self-help collectives now handle some 300 tonnes of city wastes, over the 83 square kilometres that this small city straddles. They are organised into 73 different units of ten women each. The city corporation gives each unit a grant of Rs 1.25 lakh and helps get an equal amount as bank loans, to buy two autorickshaws. Almost all of them are the unemployed from poorer city homes.

It’s not a free service. Each home must pay them a service charge of up to Rs 30 each month. Shops, hotels and offices pay more. But few seem to grudge it.

I'm from Calicut, rather Calicut is the nearest city to my home. I went to college in Calicut for five years, and naturally I've a special liking for that city. So I'm glad about this development.

Declarations apart this is one thing that I noticed when I went to Kerala in June. Not just in Calicut even in other parts, the road sides were remarkably clean and trash free. We went to Wayanad for a day and Kalpetta was very clean too. (Incidentally another thing that struck me in Kerala was the quality of functioning of our cell phones. In my earlier apartment in Bombay I used to rush to the balcony if I receive a call as the signal was very weak in the rooms. But in my home, 24 km from Calicut, 2 km away from the national highway, a typical Kerala village, in any corner of the house my cell had the full signal.)

I'm sure today there'll be public celebrations, processions, and all that, as part of this event. I remember participating in the function declaring Kerala totally literate a decade and a half ago. I had written about it some time back. That mega event was also held in Calicut.