Plantation at Rayappanahalli

Firstly, I am thrilled to report that the survival rate of the saplings we planted at Rayappanahalli last year has been excellent; nearly 80% by my estimate.

A few highlights from this year’s plantation drive at Rayappanahalli

* This time, we had a nice mix of saplings; Honge interspersed with fruit-bearing saplings that we procured from a nursery near Attibele.The Honge saplings were provided to us by the Forest Dept. of Chikkaballapur.

* The DFO of Chikkaballapur, Mr. Rajashekhar was present to oversee the operations.

* The lack of timely rains might mean that we have a lesser survival rate compared to last year.

* The saplings and the pitting costs for this initiative was borne by the advocates’ association and the Rotary Club of RMV.

* Mr.  Ashwath Reddy, the chieftain of the village, organized for a sumptuous breakfast and lunch for all volunteers. He’s been absolutely inspirational in the way he has supported us and more importantly, in the way he has rallied the village and ensured the survival of the saplings.

* And finally, thanks to the villagers of Rayappanahalli for putting up an awesome display of floor gymnastics for us. I’m baffled at the tricks they performed, all on a muddy road!

Tree Plantation for 2009

The monsoons have been quirky this year, but we reckon we have time for a couple of tree plantation drives before this season ends. The DFO of Chikkaballapur, Mr.Rajashekhar, has already identified areas where we can plant up to a 100,000 trees. Mr.Vivek Reddy, who has been leading this effort from the Advocates’ association, has promised to take care of roughly 20,000 of these. He has also gotten in touch with the Rotary club to support them too. We are looking for other groups to take up this initiative too. Here are some aspects of the plan:

* Species: The last time around, we had planted nearly 10,000 trees at the foothills. All the saplings planted were of Honge type. This time we are trying to avoid the monoculture and to mix up the saplings. Here’s a good post from Praja that offers suggestions on what species could be planted. We are still in the process of finding nurseries that we could buy these from.

* Costing: Here’s the breakup of costs

Digging the pits: Rs 6 per pit

Refilling the pit with manure: Rs. 2 (for the labour)

Cost of Manure: Cost of saplings: Rs. 1.50 (for Honge) up to Rs 25 (for more exotic species)

* Timelines: To give the saplings a good chance of surviving to the next season, we need to plant them before the end of August.

* Contribution: You could take responsibility for one section of the allotted area and arrange for the volunteers. One of us can co-ordinate for you the activities with the Forest department, and also make the labourers available. You are also free to lend your hands on the day of any of these drives about which I will add more information as we go along. We will also post details on how you (or your organization) can contribute monetarily to any of the individual drives.

What now?

Prashanth, Sridhar, Manjari and I met with the Special Officer Mr.Mahantesh Murgod to discuss the future course of action in this project. Before I unveil our new plan, let me talk about what didn’t work the last time around.

* Forcing tourists to dispose their plastic at the gate did not please too many people. We had asked shopkeepers to empty chips and other condiments into paper bags before handing them out. This did not go well with customers.
* We had bunched bins in groups of three; for plastic, organic and anything else. However, the segregation was almost never done by people who used the bins. We could blame this on lack of awareness.

This is what we propose to do in future
* We won’t rely on people to segregate the trash. Instead, the horticulture department has agreed to employ its staff to do the separation. Outside the fort, Prashanth has employed folks to collect the plastic strewn by the approach road and bring it to a common dumping place up the hill.
* We have decided to procure large containers in which to store the plastic waste. Periodically, we intend to arrange for a plastic waste disposal company to pick up the trash. The idea of using large containers is to make it viable for the waste management company to send a truck all the way up the hill. We are contacting Saahas for help on this aspect. Any information in this regard will be appreciated.
* We are looking for an efficient way of compacting the garbage to reduce the volume of trash that we have to store and hence to reduce the frequency of clearance. More info anybody?
* In the coming weeks, we also intend to reach out to the new DC as well.

Catching up!

Long time since I updated this. Here are some of the highlights from the last six or seven months.

* We’ve been helping out Mr.Vivek Reddy and the advocates’ association in their afforestation campaigns. The saplings we planted during the last monsoons are now taller than me. We intend to restart that effort.
* The DC Mr. Subodh Yadav was transferred out of Chikkaballapur. We’ve not yet made contact with the new DC.
* On the cleanliness front, the rules about plastic usage are not enforced with the same strictness anymore. The place, however, looks cleaner than a year ago. More about that in the next post.

More Trashbins

Great news! Mr. Prashanth Prakash, who has his roots in the Nandigram village, has confirmed the order of 40 dustbins to be installed on the hilltop. More details shortly.

Nandi Hills cleanup drive – 24th Aug 2008

We started out seeking to establish a permanent solution to the litter problem in Nandi hills. On Sunday I think we took a significant step. This was never meant to be a simple cleanup drive because we knew that the garbage we pick up this sunday will find its way back before the next. We had to enlist the support of the powers that be. We had to make “noise”. That was the intention of involving the district commissioner’s office and the high court judges. The DC announced the zone plastic-free. The enforcement began in full earnest. Visitors were stopped at the gates, and asked to throw away their plastics, and paper bags were handed over to them. At the shops on the hilltop, shopkeepers cut open packets, emptied condiments into paper bags and handed them over. The cynics asked “How long will this really go on?”. Watch this space.

The morning began with about 20 esteemed judges from the Karnataka high court, along with the District Minister, pledging their support to this cause. After the short ceremony, we spread ourselves out and started collecting the garbage. Within an hour and a half we had more garbage than the truck could carry on one trip. We also managed to fill our second mini-truck that was transporting the plastic to be recycled.

pic:Deepa Mohan

It has been an amazing few weeks. Most heartening of all has been the number of people who have wanted to join us on this campaign. Although turning down several people during the last couple of days was a hard thing to do, it still felt heartening to see the sheer number of people who are willing to lend their hands to this. I think if we can only channelize all that intent, we can accomplish a whole lot of things. However, all hasn’t been rosy. Here are a few things that frustrated us.

* The number of people who turned up (600, judging by the amount of food consumed) threw us off-track a bit. This not only meant that some people were just completely uninterested in the cleaning up, but also resulted in us leaving a rather large carbon footprint in the process.
* In the melee, we also failed to effectively communicate the guidelines for the segregation of waste. This meant that a lot of plastic that could have been used for other purposes went to the landfills.

* There were too many people taking credit for nothing. Here’s our opportunity to acknowledge the real people behind this.

We thank…

* The DC, Mr. Subodh Yadav. He definitely is the man who can make or break this endeavour. So far, his support and execution have been irrefutable.
* There were a lot of judges present, and the numbers in which they turned up was definitely important, but one person deserves special mention. Justice Subhash Adi! His drive and commitment and the way he has managed to rally his peers around this cause has been really uplifting.
* Our sponsors, Yahoo!. The PR team from Yahoo! has backed us fantastically.
* Mr.Vivek Reddy and Mr. Arun, advocates who managed to provide everybody breakfast and lunch. Their energy is most inspiring. They have an ambitious target in their ongoing afforestation efforts at Nandi, and we hope we can support them in that campaign the way they have supported us in these last few days.
* Mr. Mahantesh Murgod, Special officer Nandi Hills and Mr.Rajashekar, DFO, Chikkaballapur.
* Roopa Sankaran from Clean & Green, who provided almost all the information we needed.
* All our volunteers. My hope is that we keep this association going and shoot for bigger things.

Some media mentions

Deepa’s report

Hindu

The Last Lap (Please note change in date)

We are on the final lap of preparations for the Nandi Hills cleanup drive. Here are a few things that we wanted to convey

* Several volunteers called us to have the drive shifted to Sunday 24th August. This also came in as a request from the DC ’s office who wanted this to happen on a government holiday so that we could solicit better involvement from the government authorities. So please note that the drive has been postponed by one day. It’s now going to happen on the 24th August. If you have forwarded information about this campaign to other groups or mailing lists (hasiruUsiru for eg), please make sure that you update them with this new information.

* So far we’ve had amazing co-operation from the DC’s office, Forest Department, Youth services, Horticulture department and the other authorities. We are confident that the area will be declared plastic-free. More importantly, we are sure that we will be able to prevail upon them to enforce the rules strictly.

* A group of high court judges are very enthusiastic about joining us on this drive. This was another reason why we decided to shift it to Sunday. Also, we have joined hands with the advocates association of Bangalore, and together we plan to combine the cleanup drive with an afforestation effort. There is going to be a sapling planting event in the morning of the 24th too. The district forest office is blessing this effort.

* We have to start arranging for the transportation soon. We request all volunteers to mention their location in Bangalore in the spreadsheet so that we can accordingly decide the start points of the transport vehicles. Please note that we won’t be able to have too many start points, and that we might ask you to arrange your own commute to a common location.

* We have funds left for about 10 trash bins. However, we got to know from the horticulture department that this number is hardly enough for the 60 acres that is in their jurisdiction. If any of you have ideas/funds for the remaining 20 or so trash bins we’d love to hear from you as soon as possible.

That’s it for now. In the coming week, we’ll be getting in touch with each of the volunteers to co-ordinate the whole drive.

Joining hands with Clean & Green

Clean and Green is a group of volunteers (http://cleanngreen.blogspot.com/, mailto:cleanandgreen@googlegroups.com) who have conducted very similar campaigns in other parts of the state, and we thought we should join hands with them. The confluence forms a bigger community of volunteers and we also learn from their experiences. Here are some of the notes from our meeting with Roopa from Clean and Green.

Inventory needed

* Workman gloves – 50

* Garbage bags and/or gunny sacks (50)

* Large needle to stitch the gunny sacks

* Weighing scale

* Rakes (10, apart from the ones we can borrow from the Nandi Hills gardeners)

* Trashbins (12 monkey-proof ones)

* Basic first-aid kit.

Garbage segregation

The garbage that we collected should be segregated as follows

* This polythene covers.

* PET (bottles), ice-cream cups, spoons etc.

* Composite (Gutkha wrappers, Lays etc)

* LEAVE THE GLASS BOTTLES ALONE. They can injure people

Tips for volunteers

Please bring enough water. Rehydrate often.

Get a poncho and a cap.

The rains wash up the garbage to hard-to-reach places on the hill face. At least some of us need shoes with good grips. That said, let’s not taking any unwise risks.
Further action items

Please leave a comment if you want to take up one or more of these.

* Arrange for transportation (contact Rakesh Chandra from Oracle)

* Order food (Contact caterer at nandi hills)

* Buy bags, needles and gloves (contact Rakesh Chandra for the gloves and the rakes)

* Speak with KK Plastics to see if they want to consume the plastic that we collect. They use the plastic to strengthen asphalt that’s used on the roads.

* Contact Sandeep Chakravarthy. He can put us in touch with Vinay Luthra from KSTDC and Rajaram (who runs a waste management firm) to discuss some long-term garbage disposal scheme.

* Communicate our plan to the DC, Mr. Subodh Yadav. Discuss if he’s ok with branding on the dustbins.

* Buy paper bags to provide to the shop-keepers at the hill top. Decide the size and numbers (and any branding opportunities for our sponsors).

Litter-free Nandi Hills

Nandi Hills is a hill station situated about 60kms from Bangalore. Apart from all the lure that the place has just on account of being a hill, Nandi Hills has a lot of historical significance too. It also affords some magnificient views.

However, with the tourists comes the trash. The hill face is littered with polythene and paper. It is depressing no doubt. But while we were sulking over the apathy of the general population, we also wondered if we were really as helpless about the situation as we pretend to be. That’s how we came up with the idea of swarming the hill one day and cleaning up as much as we can.

When?
Saturday, 23rd August, 2008. (to begin with)

How can you help?
1. Ideas: How do we make this effort sustainable and not a one-time fad? How do we raise consciousness and stop people from littering the place in the first place? If you have conducted a similar exercise, we’d love to hear from you.
2. Hands: Leave a comment with a trackback if you want to join us on this drive. We’ll need vehicles to bring back the garbage too.
3. Sponsors: We need gloves and garbage bags for the volunteers. We also plan to set up a trash disposal system there with dustbins at regular distances. This costs money. Let us know if you would like to pitch in.

Send a mail to litterfree [at] ymail [dott] com.

or call 99809 40872

If you want to volunteer, put your name here http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pcg6l1lkoIvWHV7LIScCKMA&hl=en

The plan

- Enlist 40 volunteers.

- Hire a bus to ferry us to the hill. The plan is to reach there at least by 6:30 in the morning.

- Fill as many bags of garbage as possible. We have requested the authorities to send a garbage truck to move the trash to an appropriate landfill.