IITGN has always taken lead when it comes to helping and guiding its neighbouring villages take up progressive initiatives in their vicinity. Continuing its legacy, the institute extended handholding support to the villagers of the Basan village and helped them take baby steps towards cleanliness, under the Swacchata hi Seva campaign.
The institute had earlier conducted various awareness activities with children in the primary school of Basan, followed by several counseling sessions with village leaders, men and women. They were educated about Solid Waste Management (SWM), wet and dry waste, hazards of plastic waste, and the importance of cleanliness through posters and live demo activities of waste segregation. The members of IITGN SWM team also oriented school and village’s cleanliness workers about waste segregation practices.
Besides, the IITGN SWM team also put up pictorial awareness posters about waste segregation in major public spots in the entire village to reinforce the message in the minds of the villagers. The institute also donated wet and dry waste dustbins to primary school to help inculcate waste segregation practice in young minds. They installed clean and recycled lab material containers as dustbins outside most of the shops in the village and motivated the shopkeepers to encourage villagers to use those dustbins. The waste from there is later collected by the waste collection vans. Awareness messages have also been put up outside shops to discourage the use of plastic bags.
School children were sensitised on waste segregation techniques. Vishwa Desai, a seventh-standard student in Basan Primary School was quick to share, “We regularly use two different dustbins provided to our class, and discard our paper and plastic waste separately so that it can be recycled.”
Raghunath Desai, a shopkeeper in the Basan village, said, “After IITGN put their dustbin with a poster for using it for dry waste, we have kept two more dustbins outside our shop. We started asking people to use these dustbins and many have started doing so. Cleanliness brings good health.”
Mrs Nupur Tandon, Solid Waste Consultant for the IITGN Green Office, shares her experience and challenges in bringing change in people’s behaviour, “It is a long journey but we are taking one step at a time as I believe, we need to invest in people to tackle any social issue. We started this initiative with Basan Primary School about a year ago and expanded it to reach out to the entire village. We are happy that people have started understanding its importance as we can see many of them in practice now. We will continue our work and contribute to the Swachchh Bharat Mission.”