HYDERABAD : Sixty minutes. One hour. Every week. Do you think this can make your city cleaner? Ravadi Kantha Rao, co-founder of the NGO ‘P3PA’ (Planet 3 Protection Alliance) hink so. “The amount of litter and plastic I saw everywhere was disturbing,” he says. In March this year, he chose to start a citizen led voluntary project called ‘Shubra Hyderabad’ in collaboration with the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation.
This movement is the latest initiative by P3PA, a Hyderabad based NGO which promotes and encourages eco-friendly, sustainable and green practices for a better living. The initiative aims at engaging citizens in devoting an hour a week to take part in clean up drives organised at a few of the most requisite and accessible places in the city like DLF, Hi-tech city railway station, IDL lake, KPHB colony and Nizampet grounds.
Talking about the movement, Rao says, “We are the ones who are littering and not responsibly handling the waste. If this continues, it is going to be hard for any organisation or government body to clean up. It is easier for us to inculcate slight changes in our littering habits and take ownership of our own premises”. Every week, school and college students, corporate employees, locals and the NGO volunteers take part in this clean up, along with the GHMC workers.
Rao currently works full time as senior quality engineer at S&P Global, financial analytics and information firm, and makes time to manage the NGO. “Unlike other popular clean-up movements that had lots of hype around them and then slowly died off, we want Shubra Hyderabad movement to be continuous, hence we made it a weekly activity so that it is convenient for everyone to participate. Also, only when we do something by ourselves, we understand the efforts that the task demands. When somebody else does something for us, it is likely that we don’t take responsibility for it. So, we are working to bring in changes in that sort of attitude.
By involving ourselves in such activities, we understand the efforts that go into cleaning up. We also tend to avoid further littering”, he continues. Anyone can volunteer and work with the organisation by registering on their website (www.p3pa.org). On how the NGO shortlists areas for the clean-up, Rao says “We target locations that mostly have plastic litter, as majority of nalas and sewerage channels get choked due to the plastic waste and stop the flow of the rain water.
We inspect locations ourselves before we conduct a clean-up there”. In addition to cleanliness, clearing up plastic also avoids water logging, improves percolation of rainwater into ground, saves animals from consuming polyethene. But what if people continue to litter even after the clean-up? “True. It’s human tendency to litter a place that is not tidy and organised already. But in a clean place, we think twice before throwing a wrapper.
At least 95% of people that I have observed are hesitant to litter the place again after we clean it up. And with the continuous engagement of the citizens everyone will influence their family and their circle of people, that’s how the change gradually happens. In fact, the change I am talking about has happened to me only after I took part in the drive. ” GHMC supports the Shubra Hyderabad by providing tools and transport. However, given the raising temperatures, volunteer count has considerably gone down.
“It takes three hours to three weeks to clean up a place, depending on the number of volunteers and the amount litter in that place,” Rao says. The NGO also looks forward to partnering with local recycling companies to recycle polyethene and turn wet waste into manure. This initiative intends to reclaim Hyderabad’s glory as the cleanest metro city in the country.
While Shubra Hyderabad is about clean up drives, Haritha Vanam, another initiative of this NGO, is about tree plantation drives. Volunteers from corporates such as Microsoft, Infosys, TCS, Google and a few other MNCs are involved in it. For Harithon, the longest sustained green run in India organised by P3PA, around 8,000 participants from universities like Gitam University, Osmania University, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University and Prof. Jayashankar Agricultural University. .