Villages clean-up

Kuilaypalayam and Edayanachavady, two of Auroville’s neighbouring villages, are in the process of being cleaned up. Over the years, many local schools have created strong eco-clubs which are building environmental awareness by doing environmental programs. One of these is the New Era Secondary School’s ‘trash-clean up walk’ initiated by the students themselves, which has been taking place for the last 10 years.

The clean-up effort has recently started to include many interested adults. In Kuilaypalayam, a committee of nine is now directing the Clean Kuilaypalayam effort. The team includes a few Aurovilians. On November 23rd, it organized a big event involving students of the Kuilaypalayam Trust School, the New Era Secondary School, the Kuilaypalayam Cultural Center, the Hygiene Team, and the Yatra Multimedia Center walking the streets picking-up trash and spreading awareness. They began the work early in the morning, joined by a few Aurovilians. Apart from picking-up trash by hand, JCB’s and trucks were rolled in to clean major trash areas.

The work will continue in 2015. The team plans a variety of activities such as installing more waste bins, creating segregation mechanisms, and spreading awareness by screening short films on the subject and encouraging street plays and creative expression. In close cooperation with the village leaders, the effort is to involve as many people as possible to transform their local environment.

Similar to the Clean Kuilaypalayam effort, Edayanachavady now too has a youth group called the Edayanachavady Green Campaign. It all started when the volleyball team took a dip in the village temple pond. Ramanan, one of the group members, explained how uneasy they all felt “swimming in the junk”. They started to clean the pond. “We were around 6-10 people. Later that evening we discussed how we could sustain this activity. That’s how our cleaning campaign got started. We decided to clean every Sunday morning.”

The numbers of participants fluctuate, but usually there are in the range of 12-20, from different age groups. Their current work is to clean public spaces to show their serious commitment to a clean environment. Their long term plan is. as the boys put it, “to do much more work to convince and get support from the community.” They want to create a segregation unit, work on tree planting, encourage household herbal gardens and improve the public toilet facilities. At present they don’t receive any support. “We are managing ourselves and do our own funding. So everything will happen slowly. To start the segregation unit, we have started a trash survey. Also, we have to get rid of the sources of plastic. We are finding it difficult to collect enough tools to clean the waste. We hope we can extend our efforts to other villages in the future, but first we have to set an example here.”

There are many ideas, but as with any positive movement, this cause calls for the participation and support of many, many more. Both teams look forward to working together one day in the effort not only to clean their immediate areas, but to extend their movement further into their neighbouring bioregion.