With four days to go for the Guinness World Record attempt at involving the largest number of people in litter collection, the Coimbatore Corporation, Clean Cities Championship, non-government organisations and others are leaving no stone unturned to make the event a success.
According to sources, in the past couple of days the civic body officials, along with representatives of NGOs having been reaching out to education institutions, corporate companies and also government agencies to send their students, employees or members of the workforce to participate in the March 8 event.
The target is to have around two lakh volunteers.
It is on this front they are worried, the sources say, adding that the worry is due to the delay in reaching out to the institutions, which have to understand what their role and that of the students will be on the day and then explaining it to the students.
The plan is that students, employees or members will go to the ward allotted, enrol electronically at designated places and then go about collecting litter for an hour or so within earmarked spaces. The organisers have planned 2,000 such enrolment centres in the 100 wards.
The championship will be open from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. at which time the volunteers should collect litter for an hour or so to complete their participation. At the time of registration, the organisers will provide gloves and collection bags to the volunteers.
The Corporation has begun pushing door-to-door collection of waste through conservancy workers, almost of all of whom have got newly-designed push carts.
Since March 1, the workers have been collecting waste in segregated fashion by asking residents to hand over dry and wet wastes in separate bins. Their doing so is part of the championship the Coimbatore Corporation and other agencies are conducting for promoting segregated waste collection.
The workers, their supervisors, sanitary officers and the zonal sanitary officers will get prizes for segregated collection and waste processing and so will households that handover waste in segregated fashion.
And, the workers will also get money by selling the processed waste to recyclers. To buy the segregated waste the Corporation has tied up with two companies that have divided the 100 wards between themselves to take the waste for processing and sell the waste that they don’t require to other recyclers.
