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Dimapur, March 4 (EMN): Students of a college in Dimapur are taking a month’s challenge to clean some areas of Dimapur city as part of a street cleaning project in collaboration with the Dimapur Municipal Council (DMC).
Members of the Sakus Mission College’s (SMC) Eco Club are taking the maintenance of the city’s streets in their hands with a desire to give back to the community. The activity includes educating shopkeepers.
The students of the college took up the challenge to clean the heart of Dimapur proper from the Holy Cross junction to the Delux point, Mhonthung Lotha, the head of the college’s Sociology department told reporters on Wednesday March 4.
An initiative of the council, Lotha said that the DMC wanted to make the area from the Holy Cross junction to the Delux point "litter free" and had approached the college with the project. The students took cleaning the streets on February 21.
44 active members of the college’s Eco Club, he said, have completed 13 days of the one-month of cleaning the area. Besides, they educate shopkeepers to place a waste bin and not only depend on the DMC to clean the waste.
Lotha observed that until and unless the streets are made tobacco-free it will be a considerable task to maintain cleanliness there.
The leaders of the college’s Eco Club, Vito and secretary Thujoshelu, said the group consented to take up the project as the club had been taking up activities within the college’s campus. That way they could work and ‘come out of their comfort zone,’ which made them take the challenge to give back to the city.
The SMC Eco Club converges at the Holy Cross junction every day after class and gets to the street cleaning for two-three hours besides educating the shopkeepers to keep their areas free from waste. They are also told to keep a waste bin of their own and not just those provided by the DMC, Vito said.
It is not just the responsibility of the municipal council to clean the city’s waste but that every individual should contribute to keep the city clean instead of blaming the authorities.
‘The experience has been an eye-opener for us as we realised that it is easy to thoughtlessly throw our waste on the streets but a task to clean those accumulated waste. We have learned to be responsible towards our community and city,’ the group’s members said.