Monday Jan 27, 2025
Monday Jan 27, 2025
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| Nuwara Eliya Municipal Commissioner K.M.H.W. Bandara |
By the Harmony page team
From September to December 2024 the Harmony page has been extensively focusing on a research-based series of articles concerning the garbage situation of Nuwara Eliya. In the month of December, this page, which seeks to assist in policy ideation, carried a list of suggestions on how to deal with the unfortunate national psyche of being immune to litter and littering that is seen across Sri Lanka, whether it be in rural or urban areas of this country.
The Harmony page was conceptualised in 2019 to focus on aspects such as earth healing, arts, peacebuilding, integrated knowledge, and to bring national solutions where possible while creating a model for activism based journalism.
In our series that focused on irresponsible cluttering of the country with household refuse being haphazardly thrown across this paradise isle, seriously harming its tourism potential, we mentioned that a new Municipal Commissioner was to arrive in Nuwara Eliya by end of last year. Within the first week of him taking over office we furnished Municipal Commissioner K.M.H.W. Bandara with our research material, photographs and the articles that we had published in this page with the necessary details concerning the garbage menace of Nuwara Eliya district. Subsequently meeting him in person and members of his staff, we suggested that the Municipal Council carries out the mandatory area inspection in many additional practical ways (as opposed to merely using a vehicle where many aspects of the garbage issue could be missed).
Since our research was carried out entirely by walking across Nuwara Eliya (enabling us to be privy to the incredible disgusting sights across nooks, crannies, alleys and main-roads of the district that included roadside burning of plastic items), we suggested that the commissioner asks his staff to walk to work within an extent such as two kilometres and note down areas where they see garbage thrown, reporting these information back to their office, the Nuwara Eliya Municipality.
Disposing domestic trash randomly
Nuwara Eliya has an immense problem concerning households which are located uphill and the ingrained habit of disposing domestic trash randomly, especially into waterways and drainages as well as public pollution by burning non bio degradable items including batteries. The discipline of segmenting domestic garbage and carrying out the civic duty of diligently waiting for the municipal lorries is not imbibed by much of the population of Sri Lanka, where it is considered perfectly normal to dispose of trash in front of other people’s gates.
Nationally, across districts, there seems to be a weekly insufficiency of trips made by the municipal lorries across the country to get the garbage collected. This page will subsequently ideate on how municipal councils across the country can help clean the nation while also making more money and being a harbinger in encouraging entrepreneurship in the district which will assist the council to strategise in the investing of more upgraded municipal lorries. How the Municipal Council can work with the National Inventors Commission in encouraging student inventions for solving the garbage issue is also an initiative we will undertake this year.
We learnt last week that the new Municipal Commissioner for Nuwara Eliya had instructed all staff members to walk on Friday for at least a segment of the route to office, permitting them not to be too strict on formal in attire or arrival timing. He has started leading by example by walking to work on most days of the week and personally talking to people en route and cleaning the roads personally. This kind of diligence is found certainly in the Western world which is why we Sri Lankans who travel to those nations do not have to trip over roadside trash.
However, this kind of work ethic is still a rarity in Sri Lanka. Thereby the Harmony page is happy to engage with the Municipal Council of Nuwara Eliya to ensure that the media research we started in a bid to assist the Clean Sri Lanka initiative reaches some fruition.
We also wish to assist in finding an alternative to the country maintaining large scale ‘dumps’ so that at least in the year 2025 Sri Lanka finds a non-dumping solution as nations such as Singapore, South Korea and Japan have achieved. In these countries there are no haphazard strewing of garbage and there are no garbage dumps.
We are continuing to study the policies of nations who have invested money, time and expertise to ensure their countries are kept in pristine condition and have committed themselves to using recycling as a national entrepreneurial endeavour.
We have accepted an invitation by the Nuwara Eliya Municipal Council to make a presentation of some of the photographs we possess along with the specific locations of the garbage dumping related to Nuwara Eliya and provide the authorities all the relevant details of the issue as we understood in our media research. This is to be scheduled this month.
Symbolic of irresponsibility of citizens
The garbage issue across Sri Lanka is symbolic of irresponsibility of citizens to the wellbeing of their motherland, disrespect to fellow beings and the carelessness with which we treat this richly verdant country which is considered heavenly by countless tourists every year.
To ensure Sri Lankans do not ruin their country and its tourism, we need to work on multiple fronts, beginning with the education system of both children and teachers, having a stringent policy that forbids one time plastic and use of plastic bags as food containers, investment in research to create bio degradable business promotion (where the encasing on all products are sustainable conscious).
We will be following this issue throughout this year from various dimensions and publish below the policy ideation we published in one of our recent editions, alongside our other writings on the lack of a national waste management policy. Why we commenced by focusing extensively on Nuwara Eliya is because there are many rural communities which earn from tourism and where the unhygienic conditions across the roads and main city seriously threaten national revenue generation in the long run.
https://www.ft.lk/harmony_page/Ideation-on-policy-creation-Lankan-earth-resources-protection-and-human-health-Part-1/10523-769916
https://www.ft.lk/harmony_page/Importance-of-every-citizen-supporting-Clean-Sri-Lanka-initiative-of-President-AKD/10523-770828
https://www.ft.lk/harmony_page/Foreign-tourism-businesswoman-shares-insight/10523-770495
https://www.ft.lk/front-page/Of-mountains-waterfalls-and-garbage-wars/44-769600
https://www.ft.lk/harmony_page/Preventing-threat-of-Nuwara-Eliya-being-turned-into-garbage-site/10523-769307
