Keep Dhaka clean
In Bangladesh peoples education in public cleanliness is pitifully low. Even when they see that there is a waste bin nearby, they do not use that and litter the street. Throwing a piece of paper or an empty plastic bottle into a dustbin does not require a good deal of effort, it just needs an awareness to keep the place where he lives in clean. Yet most people do not have this commitment. According to a report published in this newspaper yesterday, the small and medium sized waste bins numbering about 15,000 that the two city corporations of the capital placed in the Dhaka streets are remaining unused, mostly. The bins which are situated in the marketplaces only do find their users. But it is noticed, wastes these busy places produce are huge and the bins are hardly able to contain them.
People not using the waste bins are not the whole story. In many places bins have just been stolen away, keeping in the place only their frames. This failure of the keep Dhaka clean programme thus emphatically tells us that unless city dwellers are adequately sensitized about their responsibility of keeping the city clean, even placing double or triple or more waste bins than the present 15,000 will not help.
And here it must be pointed out that there was a clear lack of an effort on the part of the two city corporations to make people aware of their particular civic responsibility when they put the waste bins in the capital. There is also an opinion that people who come from the countrys different places into the capital everyday are mostly responsible for littering the capitals streets and footpaths with wastes.
There might be some truth in it, but unless the permanent city dwellers themselves do change their habit, the ever littered streets of Dhaka will never look clean. Thus everything boils down to making people aware. You cannot police the people who throw dirt on the streets with fine like many other cities in the world, but police can here at least give a rebuke to them whenever they spot them.
This would also generate the necessary awareness. Indeed, the mayors of the two city corporations with only a few thousand workers at their disposal alone cannot keep the populous city clean, but they can certainly bombard the city dwellers using media, organizing campaign programmes on streets, distributing leaflets among people and other means about the matter.
