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Aundh pilot project in Pune to drive Red Dot garbage campaign into 30,000 homes gets going
It was the 400 Swach workers sitting in the audience, who pick up your garbage for a living, that were to be the true beneficiaries of the pilot project.
Wrap, mark and segregate sanitary waste separately. It is a message that is increasingly getting the bandwidth it deserves, and on Wednesday, at the Pandit Bhimsen Joshi Auditorium in Aundh, the message took centre stage.
It was not Dnyaneshwar Molak, head of PMC’s head of Solid Waste Management, or Rajeev Srivastava, from Proctor and Gamble, a sponsor, or even corporators Jyoti Kalamkar, Sunita Wadekar and Baburao Chandere, who were all present, that the launch of the campaign concerned.
It was the 400 Swach workers sitting in the audience, who pick up your garbage for a living, that were to be the true beneficiaries.
The Red Dot campaign entails every household in Aundh, the launch area for the pilot project, to, “Mark sanitary waste with a red dot and for it to be stored in separate bags/bins, from houses till the disposal site,” said Lakshmi Narayanan, founder of Swach.
The Red Dot campaign will target 30,000 households in Aundh.
“Sanitary waste needs to be wrapped and marked with a red dot and disposed off separately. This helps the waste collector easily move the separated garbage to the next stage of the disposal system,” said Molak.
Tanaji Pharande, a Swach worker who serves the IMD colony in Pashan, said, “Together with a Swach mitra (friend), we will be going house-to-house to tell residents how to handle, wrap and add the red dot, using newspapers and a sketch/felt pen. The idea is to make people sensitive about health and hygiene.”
The Red Dot campaign actually began in 2017. In 2020, Swach has 33 staffers monitoring this system and 565 disposal vans equipped with special boxes for sanitary waste.
“This is a pilot project will run for three months and then, continue we will spread it to the entire city,” said Molak.
