There is every chance that the city’s residents may find neatly drawn
colourful ‘kolam’ at a few places they are used to seeing garbage.

The new ‘kolam’ initiative is part of the civic body’s strategy to dissuade people from dumping garbage in the open.

According to health wing officials, the civic body had identified garbage vulnerability points across the five zones.

Those
were points were in the people dumped garbage. By cleaning the garbage,
tidying the place and drawing ‘kolam’, the Corporation wanted to break
the people’s habit of dumping garbage at those points.

Aside from
drawing ‘kolam’, the Corporation conservancy workers would work the
residents to persuade them to hand over garbage in segregated fashion to
them so that the latter did not throw garbage on the streets. To begin
with the Corporation had identified five such garbage-vulnerable points
in each of the five zones, the officials said.

This was not a one-off effort where the workers would draw ‘kolam’ just once.

They
would do it regularly to ensure that the place was clean and tidy and
people did not dump waste. And, they would have to update the senior
officials with pictures of the place. This way the Corporation hoped to
bring about a behavioural change in the people, the officials added.

This
was a very welcome step but the Corporation would not be able to
increase the number of such places and monitor those because of the
shortage of conservancy workers.

There were at least 50 such vulnerable points in each zone but the Corporation could not monitor each of the points.

More workers

The
only way it could reduce such vulnerable points was by strengthening
the door-to-door collection system – appointment of more workers to
cover all localities, said officials who did not want to be named.