“Ask not what the municipality is doing for you, ask what you are doing towards maintenance of sanitation,” is the point made by Collector A. Devasena during her interactions with locals as she tirelessly goes around wards in Adilabad municipality in pursuance of improving the sanitation situation through the Pattana Pragathi programme.
“A change in attitude towards cleanliness and sanitation is essential to make our environs clean and healthy,” she observes as she drives home the point at her public meetings and interactions with people in wards.
The Collector pulls no punches in her crusade towards ending open defecation, among other things. She even threatens erring people with fines under the new regulations that ban defecation in open places.
And there is a lot of change in attitude of people like Pandiri Eashwari of Mahalaxmiwada. “Evari chettha vallu buttalalo jama chesi tractor lo veyali (People should collect the garbage in dustbins and dispose it in tractors),” she asserted.
Ms. Devasena, who has won four national-level awards for her work on sanitation during her stint as Peddapally Collector, does not spare any effort in drilling the sense of cleanliness.
On Sunday, she spent much time telling a couple of children the proper way of disposing chocolate wrappers.
The town looks much cleaner since the Pattana Pragathi started a few days back. Every morning, teams of workers and officials from respective wards can be seen cleaning the surroundings, in mission mode.
“The 15-member committees, youth committee, women’s committee, senior citizens’ committee and the one comprising other eminent people in every ward, are expected to cover a lot of ground that they are doing,” claimed Adilabad horticulture officer G. Srinivas, who is the special officer for ward number 23 even as he divulged one of the important aspects of Pattana Pragathi management. “These committees are meant to motivate people towards maintenance of sanitation, identify local problems and try to rectify those,” he added.
On the physical achievement of the programme, Municipal Commissioner Maruthi Prasad told The Hindu that identification of problems in all the 49 wards has been done besides cleaning shrubs in open spaces. “Many slanting electric poles and loose cables have been replaced,” he disclosed.
