THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Many areas in the city where until a few months back one could find piled up trash, green patches of open gardens adorned with aromatic flowers have come up now. Anyone can walk into these gardens anytime but on a small condition; “the visitor should carry a bottle of water to water the plants.’’ Green and Clean Trivandrum, a group formed through social networking sites which is behind this initiative, has now inspired other clean up drives across the state.
“Be the change, bring the change” is the slogan that members of the group propagate while cleaning up garbage dumps and converting them into open gardens. Their Facebook page ‘Trivandrum-Let’s make our city best’ served as a platform which helped this initiative. Started as a five-member group, now the page ‘Green and Clean Trivandrum’ has 86,000 members.
The initial members of the group include Vishnu G. Nair, Santhosh, Ajitha Suresh, Premjith, Vishakh Cherian and Ajith. “In January we conducted our first programme cleaning up of the 500 meter road stretch from Karamana to NSS College Niramankara. Saplings were planted on both sides of the road,” said Ajith, one of the founding members of the group.
Karan, a class four student, was felicitated by Shashi Tharoor, MP, for being the youngest member to plant the most number of trees during the initiative. The second programme of the group was launched on “Vishu.” About 500 people participated in the clean-up drive including 200 volunteers from NSS College. An open garden “Indeevaram” was set up. Besides, a 750-litre water tank was also installed to water the plants. The water is supplied by the corporation.
“We have created ‘open gardens’ with modern gardening techniques such as vertical gardens which helps in optimal utilisation of limited space. We also distributed about 500 saplings to the public as part of the programme. But sadly, some expensive saplings that we planted were stolen from the open garden within a few days,” Ajith lamented. But that has not disheartened the team members who will set up the next open garden near Plamoodu on Sunday.
