Friday, July 17, 2009

Clean the Mentality First


As Commonwealth Games draw nearer, there is worry all round among concerned officials and leaders about Delhi’s looks. Those who have travelled abroad say that it is one of the dirtiest cities owing to its hopeless garbage collection system.

The real problem is the unclean mentality here, which pervades wider than the garbage one finds strewn around on streets of Delhi, specially on inside streets. This is not just because of corrupt MCD which was caught having thousands of ghost employees only to draw salaries and not to remove garbage. The garbage laden mentality is the real problem.

Lately wisdom has dawned upon leaders to transfer the job of garbage collection and disposal to private hands. White and Green dustbins would be given by the MCD to each household in Delhi to segregate garbage at source. Private operators will be deployed to collect garbage from each home. Sounds nice, but let us wait how again we fail this system as well. The culture is to not care about one’s own conduct and but to just talk about others’ fault.

The authorities are worried about beggars also in Delhi. The approach in this matter seems to consider them not human beings but human garbage. It has been estimated there are some 60,000 beggars in Delhi. More than 20,000 of them are children.

Plans are afoot to remove them, without having any proper beggar homes. This again is symptomatic of mental garbage officials and politicians of Delhi possess. Cleaner Delhi by the Commonwealth Games requires we clean our mentality first.

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