The whole enterprise of Swachchh Bharat is bordering on how its people take individual responsibilities to metamorphose this dream into real. While the nation’s wheelhouse is to always look up to ideas brainstormed by the incumbent authority, brew storm in teacups over it and forget about it the next day, we need to raise alarm before it’s too late!
Our nature is in great jeopardy and we can’t relax.
In India, there are festivals that come in quick succession and Indians are always high on festivity. But the most significant time of the festive calendar is the time of Navratri and Dussera.
This time around, the Bengal and probably the whole nation celebrate Durga Puja. Now that the puja ends, organizers are prepping for the idol immersion. In the last leg of the festivities, when we immerse the idols, the nature bears the brunt of toxic clays and colours used to raise the idols, the river banks are piled up with wastes from the immersion teams, mostly plastic cups and chips packets. This one begs the question; does our nature truly deserve this scathing nonchalance from us? Perhaps not because what goes round comes around, it will come back as an igniter of the pollution corkscrew.
So, it’s time we have cut the adrenaline soaked enthusiasm a slack and adapt subtler ways to do the Visarjan. So, instead of polluting the rivers with the harmful clays and chemicals, we can build fake waterbodies to immerse the idols so that the plaster of Paris content in the idols doesn’t wreak havoc in the rivers. Rivers are the quintessential parts of nature to make any human civilization prosper. Besides, immersing Plaster of Paris idols in the water also reduces the oxygen level in the water that kills the fish and other aquatic organisms thereby perturbing the balance of ecology.
It’s a bellicose fight that all sensible individuals should put up against the malpractice and make all the nooks and crannies of Swachchh Bharat.
