Thiruvananthapuram: The city corporation plans to form citizen watch groups for the Killi river campaign through ward-level meetings. Officials said that the date and venue of these meetings will be announced later. However, normally at such meetings, only residents’ association representatives and Kudumbashree members would come. How can more stakeholders be involved? “It will be only when people start thinking that the river is theirs,” says Purushan Eloor, research coordinator, Periyar Malineekarana Virudha Samithi.
He offers a plan to implant this idea in the people’s minds. “Divide the river which needs to be cleaned into 50-m or 100-m stretches, and invite people living in this small stretch for a clean-up. There might be 10 or 20 families. Once the clean-up is over, there can be an awareness session on the functions of the river. Then find an activity which would keep their connection alive. Say, fishing, which would benefit them. An activity and not an awareness campaign will help people believe that the river is their own,” he says.
When the 2017-2018 corporation budget allocated money for reviving bathing ghats along Killi and Karamana rivers, heritage enthusiast and academic Achuthsankar S. Nair had said, “when people use the river, there will be a commitment to the river.” However, the ghat project never translated to reality. There are ways to connect to an urban crowd disconnected from the real issues of polluting a river, says Meera Gopinath, an activist from Thiruvananthapuram who has been involved in various citizen collectives in Bengaluru. For example, as part of a campaign to save Kaikondrahalli lake, they shot videos of children who lived at Mandur who had skin diseases because of bathing in the polluted river. The videos were shown to people who lived in apartment complexes.
The corporation has been running awareness campaigns like the ongoing ‘Harithavismaya’ undertaken with Green Army and Magic Academy. But in these, the people are only expected to watch, points out Pelican Foundation founder C.N. Manoj. In Varkala, his organisation along with the municipality and Suchitwa Mission spent a year campaigning about the importance of waste management. Now, the campaign is being taken forward by volunteers.
