In the evening of November 8th we invited the local school children and college girls as well as the young people from the nearby Spiti students hostel to see the video we have made of how our team are working with the village community to establish waste segregation and plastic collection house by house. They also watched Satyamev Jayatey, a TV program which discusses and advocates garbage segregation. They all realized the big problem the increasing quantity of packaging and products creates and thought about what we can all do about our own waste.
Nishtha Clean Village Programme now covers from the 55 households in Chatwan/Khanyara which are at the top end of the village where the channels which feed the village start, down to the Nepali and middle class section of the village half way down Rakkar Road. By starting at the top we are making sure that the water channels are clean, and if no plastic waste is coming down from above then the lower people don’t immediately feel it is normal to throw waste in the channels.
70% of the households we deal with are very basic farming families who produce very little plastic. The 30% middle class households are the big plastic producers and have been much more difficult to work with. However, gradually we are gaining their confidence and most people within our area now keep a bag of clean waste for our team to collect every 2 weeks.
We now have the support of our Village Panchayat who have designated the area of land where we already have the incinerator and a garbage bin for the Rakkar village garbage project. We have enclosed this and will be developing it as a garbage management and demonstration unit in the coming months. We are very happy to have received funding from the Nishtha UK Trust to be able to do this.
