Needed: A Bangalore-like 'dhamaka' on OMR

After reading about the Ugly Indians,  and seeing their six-minute video of what they did to the pavement close to Oracle office, Bangalore,  I thought, we could as well do with such dhamaka in our neighbourhood on OMR. We have no dearth of  pavements littered with trash ; and, have quite a number of spirited young residents at Mantri Synergy... And  we have it on YouTube, for all to see,  what happened in Bangalore  when a bunch of  professionals there got to work on a trash-littered pavement in the city.

As it happened in Bangalore, a bunch of techies,  presumably  from Oracle,  got togther on a Sunday morning to clean up a patch of pavement on Tavarakere Rd., opposite St.John's Wood apartments complex. Removing  a 100 kg. trash and giving the pavement a coat of whitewash took them two hours. As much of  calories-burning as you do at the gym. And then, at the end of it all, Oracle volunteers had a sense of having done something socially meaningful.

At Mantri's,  and Rosedale (across the road), we have  a pavement  with trash work cut out for us. Are you reading this, Souray Mohanty, Rahul, and Pandey ? They are founder members of our short-lived Sunday 'santhai' initiative. I can think of a host of other spirited young professionals in our apartments complex who would put on their gloves and mouth-piece for a dhamaka. Life at Mantri's, of late, has gotten a bit  monotonous and uneventful.

As I said, we have a trash heap waiting to be addressed, right in front of Mantri's, and not far from   Rosedale.  We have platoons of spirited young people in the two communities. What we need is someone to  organize the trash-cleaning, and  video the proceedings (see Ugly Indian video) for YouTube. Maybe , the pavement  we clean , Sunday , would start collecting litter agains from Tuesday. As the Oracle techies who cleaned the Bangalore pavement said, their work and painting of wall wouldn't stop people from throwing litter; not until the 60 resident families on Tavarakere Rd. put in place a waste disposal system.
But then, if we do mobilize a group to clean up the pavement in front of Mantri's, and put it on YouTube, the video would go viral, and it might  move some others into action. 

Trash heaps, a blot on OMR-ECR landscape

 None of the 50 village panchayats  under  Tirupporur Panchayat Union have addressed the problem of solid  waste management, says a report in The Hindu. Absence of landfill sites, and lack of manpower plus

 infrastructure to handle garbage disposal compund the problem.

 Upshot is an unseemly mushrooming of roadside scrap heaps along OMR, such as this one, which has come up bang in front of Mantri Synergy.. Real estate developers and neighbourhood residents, far from exploring a solution, contribute to the garbage dump. Padur panchayat couldn't care less about the mounting trash heap on our roadside.
Real estate developers  have failed the community insofar as they neither put in place effective  waste collection and sewage disposal within their complex, nor gave much thought to an integrated approach to waste and sewage disposal problem  in the Padur-Kelambakkam area. Developers of Mantri Synergy,  who first planned for garbage chute system, dropped the idea,  but failed to come up with a credible waste management system to serve our 750-unit residential complex. Our suggestion for vermicompost plant was ignored, citing lack of space. Mantri marketing people appeared more interested in selling every available sq.ft. of open area as car parking slots.
Mantri apartment owners association is now lumbered with the waste disposal problem. Executive committee could consider household biogas units for conveting kitchen waste into cooking gas. Its feasibility could be examined. We could take a trip to in Venus Colony, Alwarpet, where apartment owners association has been working for the past 5 years a system of waste management that even gives them marginal returns from sale of organic manure.
Household biogas units would however not address the wider issue of solid waste management. Residents associations of Mantri's, X-S Real, Rosedale, the Ouranya Bay, the Akshyaya and other communities would need to come together, along with Padur panchayat, to draw up a joint waste collection and disposal strategy.
The civic infrastructure - waste and sewage disposal, and water supply - has become too big and serious an issue to be left for Panchayat alone to tackle. Mutual co-operation and co-ordiantion among the gated communities, and with Padur panchayat are essential for our common welfare.
And then there is scope for the Ugly Indian type of community work, if only public-spirited residents from all neighbourhood  communities can club-up to make it happen.
Waste disposal at kalashetra, Thiruvanmiyur