Going green for calling it a day!

By our Staff Reporter

GUWAHATI, June 7: Most of go-green activists let their enthusiasm vanishes into thin air soon after having done something for the sake of formality. As soon as the sun sinks, most of such activists call it a day till the next World Environment Day.

The World Environment Day was celebrated on June 5. It seems that the observance of the day is exclusively diurl.

The habit of littering roads and other public places with filth and dirt continues after the sun sinks. For many the observance of the day ends with planting of a sapling or delivering a lecture on environment. We conveniently forget the fact that striving for wellbeing of the environment is a never ending process.

Take the instance of dustbins in the city. Some dustbins have been placed near Gauhati Commerce College bus stop, Survey, Wireless, lapara, Bhetapara etc., are not emptied towards the evening. A section of people dumps waste near the filled dustbins under the cover of darkness. The situation has come to such a pass that waste packed in plastics often litter the road badly. Vehicles plying on these roads ram the waste and litter the entire widths of the roads up to certain stretches.  

There are people who do not even hesitate to litter roads with household or other garbage or simply dump waste by throwing them through their windows. This is an issue which the GMC has to take seriously.

Thousands of saplings are planted on the occasion of every World Environment Day. Ever since the new government came to power saplings have been planted in different parts on every auspicious occasion. However, very few of them survive the wrath of heat, pollution and lack of maintence. The dead sapling of a neem tree planted by Gauhati University VC Mridul Hazarika on the university premises stands as a glaring witness to this.

Senior citizens are of the views that if the miraculous rise in plantation of saplings on the World Environment Day is kept up it will contribute much to the fraying forest cover in the state.

Senior citizens are also of the view that there should be a mechanism to switch off streetlights during the wee hours. In places like Beltola, Kahapara etc. streetlights continue to glow till 8 am. A unit of power saved is indeed a unit of power generated. Such a wasteful expenditure of power does not suit any state, let alone power-starved Assam.