CHENNAI: Sacks of trash, broken commodes, glass shards from last week’s cleanup of the Nanmangalam reserve forest dot its periphery along Velachery main road. Having been given a miss by the corporation, a week later, the sacks have been opened by hawkers looking to make a quick buck from the liquor bottles collected during cleanup. This has allowed light trash such as polythene covers and bubble wrap to drift into the surrounding scrub.
“We were told that the trash would be taken care of after we neatly piled it up, ” said Santhosh Kshathriyan, founder of Future of Tamil Nadu, an NGO, which helped in the cleanup organised by the Forest Department.“The cleanup instead of ridding the forest of trash has just transported it from one part to another,” he said.
When TNIE contacted the Forest Department which has a base in Nanmangalam, they said the extent of the trash was being displayed to people passing by. “Only when people know how much trash is being dumped inside, they will take steps to stop it,” said Lakshmana Kumar, a forest ranger in Nanmangalam forest.
This radical means of activism against littering from the forest department needs some re-thinking with more trash drifting back to the scrub every day, it is pointed out.