Supping with the garbage : The filth mentality
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: October 02, 2012 -

File pic of garbage piled up at the roadside in Imphal :: Pix - TSE

You can lead a horse to the water but you can't make him drink.

Transpose this to Manipur, or more specifically to the 27 wards of the Imphal Municipal Council and it could mean, the Government may provide pick up mini-trucks, release funds, strike a deal with NGOs and rope in the services of local clubs, but it will not make the people develop civic sense.

This is perhaps the core reason why the Zero Garbage campaign is tottering at the edge of a total collapse today. Certain points need to be put in perspectives.

The Zero Garbage campaign was launched on August 12, 2010 to at least make Imphal respectably clean.

With pressure on land growing with each passing year, due to the rapid increase in population, especially in the capital region, it meant so many things to urban living.

Ponds, which once used to be the mainstay of water sources started to be filled up to make way for human dwellings in almost all the leikais or localities, khongbans or the natural drainage system became narrower and narrower thanks to encroachment and significantly, pits or in local parlance the lukhak koms, where wastes of each household were dumped have become history.

Not surprisingly, it became the nocturnal habits of the people to slyly dump the domestic wastes on the roadsides.

The pick up mini-trucks, a component of the Zero Garbage campaign, were put into service specifically to address this point, which had and has become a nauseous problem.

True to the character of the people, which has been exhibited nonchalantly, the very purpose of the novel drive has gone unappreciated and unacknowledged.

Even as the pick up trucks made the round of each leikai and leirak to gather the domestic wastes from each household, the khongbans and the roadsides at all the lanes and bylanes continue to be used as the dumping ground for many.

This can be literally seen from the plastic carry bags, empty shampoo satchels, empty bottles and all waste material that can be imagined, clogging the khongbans and littering the lanes.

So much for making optimum use of a service provided at Rs 50 per month. It is no wonder that Manipur continues to be at the lower end of the development graph.

Such a mindset, a mentality, has echoed in other spheres of life and not only on the garbage and filth piling up on the roads and streets of Imphal.

Common sense may be the most uncommon sense to the Government, but to the public of Manipur, it should be apparent that the rarest sense is civic sense.

This can be seen in the manner in which motorists over take from the left, the endless honking on the road even though it is clear to all that the vehicles ahead cannot move forward due to a traffic jam.

In short a mindset which has been paralysed and rendered comatose by sheer selfishness.

This explains why hygiene and cleanliness does not extend beyond one's courtyard and as long as such mindset continues the people and Manipur will exist amid filth and sup with the devil, which is this case is garbage, metaphorically speaking.