Think globally, act locally

In intimate connect between liking in environments loaded with filth and getting bugged by various afflictions does not seem to have been bestowed attention of majority in the country’s population to the extent that one would desire. Mysureans with the habit of reading this daily cannot miss reports concerning solid waste, generated everyday in mountainous proportions, the offending mass proving to be the proverbial Waterloo (setback) for the city’s civic body. The game of citizens marked by their civic sense not giving up their pursuit of a clean city, by writing regularly in the ‘voice of the readers’ column and the rest disdainfully fouling up open spaces across the city is going on without either party, showing any signs of withdrawing from the game which offers no prize for the winning party. The civic body’s functionaries have clearly run out of their resources in the task of both processing the waste to safety and reforming the offending sections in the city’s estimated headcount of about 13 lakh, apart from its floating population of a lakh or so.

The latest menace of building construction debris being dumped on the roadsides in the immediate outskirts of the city holds mirror to the attitude of the Mysuru City Corporation’s army of inspectors looking the other way even on the offenders are having their sway. The owners of buildings rising in the city, whose earlier dwellings are being razed to the ground, are the passive contributors to the menace and going scot free in the bargain.

The gamut of problems being faced by the land’s people cannot but assume sharply increasing seriousness and complexity in days ahead, thanks to unrelenting addition to the present headcount, itself a problem that defies solution. Projections of populations both globally, expected to balloon to 11 billion and about one-sixth of that mass to inhabit the country by the end of the century have failed to alert the governments as well as the people about the devastation of the planet by overexploitation of natural resources and the consequent generation of waste. While less than 40 per cent of the land’s total headcount live in urban spaces, their output of waste at an estimated six times the waste generated by the rustic population should set the urbanites at large thinking seriously about their relationship with filth around them.

Global agencies under the United Nations umbrella and others are publishing authentic information supported by data to enlighten people on the imperatives of keeping living spaces free from filth to reduce the brunt of diseases if not arrest it to zero level. Mysureans are obliged to think globally and act locally towards achieving the ideal of a clean city.