Chandigarh is unquestionably one of the best cities in the country to live in, and we love it from the core of our hearts. But this is also a fact that we would like to see some out of the box thinking from the people holding seats of power to take it to a level matching our aspirations. Today, on World Environment Day, two new initiatives were launched in our City Beautiful, which we hope and pray are implemented in letter and spirit, and take us a notch up the ladder.
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The landscape of French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh is set to change with a lot of Green and Blue to be peppered across its length and breadth. Along with launch of a campaign to promote door to door segregated waste collection, which is sought to be made mandatory by the Municipal Corporation Chandigarh, a real time air quality monitoring system has also been put in place at five different locations in the city for the aware citizens to take note and get proactive in stemming the tide.
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At a state level function at Tagore Theatre, Punjab Governor and UT Chandigarh Administrator VP Singh Badnore kicked off the Green-Blue campaign by symbolically distributing a pair of green and blue bins among a handful of councillors, households, market association and door to door garbage collectors. Local Member of Parliament Kirron Kher and Mayor Asha Kumari Jaswal were also present alongwith councillors, officials of the UT Administration and Municipal Corporation, members of Resident Welfare Associations, Market Associations and contractors and garbage collectors.
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A “Greening Chandigarh Action Plan 2017-18” and “Public Display of Air Quality Index” at five different places in Chandigarh were also unveiled. Besides other actions, green action plan envisages planting of more than 2.5 lakh saplings of trees during 2017-18. It was informed that an equal number of saplings were planted during the previous financial year, exceeding the target by 25,000 saplings.
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The LED display boards for real time air quality have been installed at Sukhna Lake (at the entrance of walking track), Sector 17 (adjoining Neelam Cinema Hall), Sector 43 (ISBT), Sector 12 (near Trauma Centre, PGI) and at Railway Station, Chandigarh (at exit point in Forest Plant Nursery).
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To encourage people to segregate dry and wet, the Municipal Corporation Chandigarh will also launch a competition among wards/sectors to reward outstanding work in this field.
Later in the day, programmes were organised in all 26 municipal wards where area councillors distributed around 10,000 pairs of bins free of cost among households. The campaign is expected to continue for at least a month. Subsequently the Corporation is expected to fix rates for door to door collection of waste and pass a resolution to make it mandatory for all in the municipal limits.
