Clean, green panchayats bestowed with honour

More to come:Collector M. Jayaraman with the presidents of village panchayats which won the Nirmal Gram Puraskar in Tirunelveli

TIRUNELVELI: Collector M. Jayaraman on Monday felicitated the presidents of 11 village panchayats for having received the Nirmal Gram Puraskar, being presented by the Centre to the clean and green rural local bodies.

The Central government gives Nirmal Gram Puraskar awards to the village panchayats for ensuring the construction of toilets in every house under its jurisdiction, planting trees in every street, constructing drainage channel and converting the garbage into vermicompost.

The award carries a memento, certificate and cash award ranging from Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 5 lakh, based on the population of the award-winning local body.

And, this amount could be spent for sanitary operations, to augment drinking water supply, constructing drainage channels, establishing infrastructure facilities for solid and liquid waste management.

Since the district administration was executing the ‘Total Sanitation Campaign’ in the district with much vigour, so far 38 village panchayats in the district had bagged the Nirmal Gram Puraskar award since 2005-2006.

For the year 2008-2009, nineteen village panchayats had been selected for this award.

Mudaliyarpatti (Kadayam union), Oormelazhagiyaan (Kadayanallur), Soorankudi (Kalakkad), Inaamvellakkaal (Keezhapaavoor), Usilankulam and Chitthirampatti (Kuruvikulam), Kaanaarpatti, Karunkaadu (Maanur), Chinna Kovilaankulam (Melaneelithanallur), Chinthamani (Nanguneri), Thiruvenkatanathapuram (Palayamkottai), Chaattupaththu (Pappakudi), Aanaikudi (Radhapuram), Ilaththur and Karkudi (Shencottai), Aayiraperi (Tenkasi), Pazhavoor and Levingipuram (Valliyoor) and Ramanathapuram (Vasudevanallur) had been selected.

Since the heads of eight of these village panchayats were felicitated in a function held at Vickramasingapuram on June 21, others were honoured by Mr. Jayaraman on Monday in a simple function held at the Collectorate.

Complimenting the village panchayats that had bagged the Nirmal Gram Puraskar Award, Mr. Jayaraman informed that the district administration had nominated the names of fifty village panchayats for the award for the year 2009-2010 as these rural local bodies had fulfilled all mandatory norms to get the honour. Project Officer, District Rural Development Agency R. Sankar was present.

Reference Link
http://www.hindu.com/2010/07/06/stories/2010070657780200.htm

Courtesy
The Hindu

Changing the face of Bidar

It has been named the 22nd cleanest city in the country

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NABARD recognises Bidar as model SHG district

The town generates 40 tonnes of garbage

every day

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hygienic:The imported vacuum suction sweeper of the Bidar CMC

Bidar:How did Bidar, that was considered a dirty place three years ago, earn the distinction of being the 22 {+n} {+d} cleanest city in the country? Innovative ideas to achieve cleanliness, people’s participation, and a responsive administration have helped the city achieve it.

Three years ago, there garbage was strewn on the streets and drains were overflowing. There was no concept of door-to door collection of garbage and there were no garbage dumping sites.

However, a coordinated effort by the district administration, the CMC, NGOs and SHGs ensured that Bidar is a much cleaner city now. In the first ever National City Rating by the Union Ministry of Urban Development, the tiny town has beaten cities such as Udupi, Belgaum, Bellary, Tumkur, Gulbarga and Hubli-Dharwad.

The Union Government’s benchmarks were keeping the city free from open defecation; universal access to toilets for all, including the poor; elimination of manual scavenging; wastewater treatment; solid waste and storm water and recycling or reuse of treated wastewater, to ensure improved public health outcomes and environmental well-being.

Bidar has scored on three important areas — primary collection of garbage from houses, hygienic transportation of garbage and sanitary filling in landfill sites. Use of hi-tech machinery for cleaning of roads, drains, night soil pits and lifting and transporting garbage containers has helped.

“Nabard has recognised Bidar as a model SHG district. We decided to make use of it and we outsourced garbage collection and some other specified tasks to SHGs. It has been a huge success,” says Bidar CMC environmental engineer Abhay Kumar Habib. NGOs helped them choose SHGs. Women members of SHGs go door-to-door to collect garbage. SHGs were given 25 auto tippers on subsidy. This ensured that primary collection of garbage was complete within 35 hours. SHGs are also in-charge of cleaning drains, roads and footpaths.

The garbage is stored in dustbins placed in every ward. A trash truck picks up the containers and brings them to a site within the city. Two compactors pack garbage from 20 containers into one truck, reducing the need for movement of trucks.

Bidar generates around 40 tonnes of garbage everyday. The CMC has long-term plans to segregate this garbage and manufacture manure. “Now we are using sanitation fills to prepare manure. We plan to start harvesting very soon,” Commissioner S.R. Garwad said. “In a few months, we will distribute separate garbage bins for dry and wet waste to every household to segregate degradable and non-degradable garbage at the primary level. This will make manure production easier,” he said.

“The journey to fame has been hard and slow. But we achieved it with the cooperation of council members, NGOs and SHGs,” Deputy Commissioner Harsh Gupta said. “We were helped by the Backward Regions Grant Fund of the Union Government. We could buy 19 vehicles and other high tech equipment costing around Rs. 2.5 crore using the grant,” he said. Three years ago, Bidar had three tractors and two small trucks. Now, it has 40 containers, four dumper placers, 30 auto tippers, a nala cleaning machine, an earthmover, 20 mobile toilets, a multi purpose jetting unit that cleans roads and underground drains, and a vacuum suction sweeping machine.

Reference Link
http://www.hindu.com/2010/05/22/stories/2010052264020900.htm

Courtesy
The Hindu

A skyscraper designed to make a rotten river run clean

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Four Indonesian architects designed a skyscraper to purify Jakarta’s polluted Ciliwung River
• Slums and businesses use the river as a dumping ground
• The “purification skyscraper” would house system that cleans the river
• Concept won second place in architecture journal eVolo’s competition

(CNN) — Imagine a skyscraper that — instead of hosting offices — houses a system that purifies the water of a polluted river, employs the people living in surrounding slums and gives them a home in which to live.

That’s the revolutionary idea behind an architectural concept that aims to solve the problems generated by the polluted Ciliwung River in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.

The largest of 13 rivers which run through Jakarta, the Ciliwung flows through 72 subdistricts of the city.

Along its river banks lie a ramshackle collection of illegal slums and around 400 businesses, according to a recent report by the Jakarta Capital City Provincial Government.

The residents have long used the river as a dumping ground for household waste, so much so that the river is now classified as “heavily polluted.”

But four Indonesian architects — Rezza Rahdian, Erwin Setiawan, Ayu Diah Shanti and Leonardus Chrisnantyo — have a vision for cleaning up the river.

They submitted their idea for a so-called “purification skyscraper” to U.S.-based architecture and design journal eVolo’s skyscraper competition and won second place.

First place went to three Malaysian design students who devised a prison city in the sky where inmates would live freely in a community with agricultural fields to supply the city below.

Diah Shanti, one of the architects involved in the Ciliwung project, said: “The idea of [a] purification skyscraper came up when we thought of an environmental machine concept.”

The “machine” would work through different lines.

A filter would first separate the rubbish and organic waste from the river’s brown water. Dangerous contaminants would then be eliminated and minerals added.

At the end of the process, clean water would be available for the people and distributed to the land nearby through a system of pipes.

To become reality, the concept, called the Ciliwung Recovery Program, needs support from the government and local investors — and a lot of luck.

“Obviously it will take a lot of help and good cooperation to make such idea become real,” Shanti said.

Reference Link
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/05/05/jakarta.skyscraper.ciliwung/index.html?hpt=Sbin

Courtesy
Cable News Network.