Bhubaneswar: As the New Year steps in with a lot of hopes and aspirations for the denizens of the Temple city, the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC), in a first-of-its-kind initiative, Wednesday, distributed cotton bags, saplings and books to motivate people to have eco-friendly gifting ideas.
Generally, around the New Year, people tend to gift their near and dear ones more and in the process the packaged gifts ultimately create tonnes of wastes most of which are non-biodegradable. The BMC’s initiative will go a long way in helping people become aware of the new `gifting ideas’ like gifting saplings, books and most importantly cotton bags as the ban on polythene bags is in force in the state.
Initiating the programme, BMC Commissioner Prem Chandra Chaudhary said, “We have appealed to the public to adopt green gifting ideas through our ‘Go Green Campaign’ and our employees of BMC are following them. We hope this activity at five places across the city will motivate people to adopt the same in their day-to-day lives. They would also use the cotton bags gifted by BMC when they would go for shopping/outing.”
The BMC Commissioner also said, “The citizens should know that the city is theirs and they have to take green initiatives to make it clean and green. We hope people would adopt the suggestions of the civic body and use gifts with less or zero waste generation potential.”
‘Mu Safaiwala Rath’, a van in collaboration with a city-based private bank, was also launched through which the cotton bags were distributed and awareness created for ‘Swachh Bharat’ and ‘Swachh Bhubaneswar’ campaigns. BMC’s collaboration with the bank was under its ‘Progress through Partnership’ initiative as it has become a hallmark in BMC’s ‘people connect’ initiative across the state Capital.
The civic body distributed 2,200 cotton bags, 1,000 books and 2,600 saplings through five distribution points.
The five distribution points at Chandrasekharpur, Ganganagar, BMC-Bhawani Mall, State Museum and I Love Bhubaneswar Plaza witnessed good response from the public, said sources.