Environment2 min
Amritsar Villages Told to Start Door-to-Door Garbage Pickup and Four-Way Waste Sorting
The district administration wants every village panchayat to collect household waste from the doorstep and split it into four streams, from kitchen scraps to hazardous items.
Villages across Amritsar district have been ordered to begin door-to-door garbage collection and sort household waste at source. Additional Deputy Commissioner (Rural Development) Pallavi Mishra gave the instruction at a meeting with village heads and block officials under the Solid Waste Management Project.
Mishra asked panchayats to build a working village-level system for collecting waste and disposing of it scientifically. Sarpanches, Block Development and Panchayat Officers (BDPOs) and panchayat secretaries from several blocks attended.
The plan has a simple everyday meaning for households. Waste collection carts are to visit homes, and residents are to be taught to keep wet and dry waste apart instead of tossing everything into one heap.
Mishra also pushed for a four-way segregation system. Under it, wet, dry, sanitary and hazardous domestic waste would each be collected separately. Splitting out sanitary and hazardous waste matters because mixed rubbish is harder to handle safely and harder to dispose of properly.
The ADC said ssound waste management is key to cleanliness and a healthy rural environment. She asked officials to run special awareness drives so residents actually adopt the habit, a sign that the administration sees behaviour change, not just carts, as the harder part of the job.
She also asked Resham Singh, coordinator of the RoundGlass Foundation, to hold solid waste management activities in as many villages as possible. He is to work alongside gram panchayats so the project takes hold at the grassroots level.
Sub-divisional engineers of the Water Supply and Sanitation Department, Block Resource Coordinators and Community Development Society representatives also joined the meeting. The source report did not give a start date or deadline for the rollout.
Read the original report: Measures listed to make villages in Amritsar spick-and-span.
