The plan is to collect waste from every household for a price.

Bags will be distributed to every household to collect solid waste. The WOW team will visit the households and collect recyclable waste every 10-15 days.

“Around 40 percent of solid waste like plastic and metal generated in the city is recyclable. The project will ensure better waste management and a safe environment,’’ said Mujeeb Mohammed, president, Plan@Earth.

A kilo of waste will fetch a house owner Rs 4 for paper and Rs 2 for metal and plastic.

“The waste collected will go to a junkyard where it will be segregated and sent for recycling. This will solve the plastic menace as well,’’ he said.

ITC, which started the project in Hyderabad a couple of years ago, has extended the project to 15 cities across Andhra Pradesh and launched a pilot project in Tamil Nadu.

The Union Urban Development Ministry has provided funds under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) for the ITC to introduce such projects in 52 cities across the country.

Disposal of plastic waste is a headache for the Kochi Corporation.

“The effort to collect and recycle waste, especially plastic waste, is certainly a welcome move,’’ said Deputy Mayor C K Manisankar.

“But nobody has informed us of such an initiative so far,’’ he said.

The plastic waste is now being used for land filling purposes which may cause environmental problems like water contamination.

With plastic, metal and paper waste being collected and recycled under the new scheme environmental issues will be addressed as well.

Simon Britto MLA will inaugurate the project at a function organised under the aegis of Panampilly Nagar Residents Association.

Murugasan, senior manager ITC, Thomas Oommen, president Panampilly Nagar Welfare Association and Mujeeb Muhammed, president Plan@ Earth will attend the function.

The Minister added that GIS would also be used for constituency mapping and development work. Although he didn’t specify exactly how the government planned to use the new tool for municipal elections he did say, “This field has good applications and the youth will find jobs after training in GIS. Five to 10,000 people will be needed to operate GIS applications in the coming years”.

He was speaking at the occasion of the launch of the GEMS-IGNOU community college. Community colleges are an alternative system of education where the needs of the community are taken into consideration before framing the curriculum. For instance, a community college in Allapuzha in Kerala specialises in coir weaving.

Geographical Information Systems create databases of knowledge in fields as diverse as agriculture, soil sciences and field surveys which can be used in planning and decision-making.

The GeoMap Society, a Hyderabadbased organisation that specialises in GIS has teamed up with the Indira Gandhi National Open University to offer courses in GIS at two centres: one in Somajiguda and the other in Giraipalli village in Medak. Latha Pillai, Pro Vice- Chancellor of IGNOU, who was present at the launch said, “We want to combine the your expertise with our academic excellence and offer rural youth training so that they can join the mainstream right away”.

Though community colleges are a well recognised form of education abroad they have just been launched in India. IGNOU identified 100 such organisations across India and tied up with them. The tie-up provides these private institutes academic support in the form of certification, examination support, grading etc. The community college scheme was launched on July 4 in New Delhi.

According to Major Shiva Kiran, Principal of the GEMS-IGNOU community college, GIS is a computer-based tool that creates a multi disciplinary database.

“It can be used in diverse fields like agriculture, geology, mapping and more to store information that can be used by the government when it wants to,” he said.