Project Operation Clean-Up becomes a people’s movement in its third year

SHILLONG, May 29: Formed in August 2019 with the purpose of cleaning up rivers and greening Shillong and its suburbs, Operation Clean-Up (OCU) is now in its third year and the membership is just growing. Take the case of Malcolm Najiar who owns a JCB. He attended a meeting and pledged to lend his JCB whenever there is a cleaning drive.
On Saturday he attended the cleaning drive and brought his children along. Shubham, an organisation whose member Raghav Bajaj has been a member of OCU, provided tea and snacks to the clean-up team after their hard work.
Leading the OCU are team leaders Jiwat Vaswani of Jiva Hospitality and his team in green, Brian Wahlang and his environmentally conscious students of KC Secondary School; Priyankur Nandi who leads the team MakeSomeoneSmile and is also the secretary of the OCU. Then there are the boys in blue from Col Sishupal Security Company who have been very regular with the cleaning drives, Team Cleansman, Team Home Guards, Sankardev College, Sikh Youth Association and Jasbir Singh representing the Gurudwara Singh Sabha,
Defence PRO Wing Commander Sriprakash and Sam Diengdoh, the secretary of Urkaliar Dorbar. Martin Luther Christian University has been an active partner too as are individuals like senior advocate Anuradha Paul.
Former Tourism officer, Government of India, Roma Nongpyiur and her husband Harsh Singh have also been keen supporters of OCU and attended cleaning drives and tree-plantation programmes.
This time the team also planted saplings along the banks of the Umkaliar river after the cleaning drive. OCU has planted trees at Lum Shillong and in and round the JN Sports Complex in the past. Team Jiva is looking after the trees – watering them in the winter months and providing bamboo fences around the trees to ensure that what is planted survives.
Recently a team called Invest India met with the OCU team to think of ways and means of creating public awareness; bringing about behavioral change and also providing materials that can help in easing the cleaning up process such as nettings across the Umkaliar river to restrict the garbage to each Dorbar and ensure that the particular Dorbar cleans up the garbage every second day or enforce strict regulations on their residents since the Umkaliar flows through many localities and Dorbars.
OCU has consistently been removing tonnes of garbage from the Umkaliar. Unfortunately the Khasi Hills Autonomous District Council whose mandate it is to ensure the health of the rivers and the forests have been amiss. They and their officials have never joined a cleaning drive. Neither have the Dorbar Shnong of any of the localities. In many ways it has been a lonely journey for Team OCU with only the East Khasi Hills deputy commissioner backing the team up by way of coordinating with the Shillong Municipal Board and providing JCB when needed.
OCU however is determined to bring change and hope that when the team becomes a huge peoples’ movement the desired change will happen. OCU vice captain Jiwat Vaswani says, “It’s pointless saying I love Shillong my birthplace if I don’t give back anything to this place; hence my contribution by way of manpower.”
Brian Wahlang firmly believes that it’s pointless teaching Socially Useful Productive Work (SUPW) if the students are not actively participating in cleaning up the environment. Wahlang, Headmaster of KC Secondary School, says: “The environment is not just a subject to study in theory. It needs active participation of students and all citizens in helping it to revive and breathe easy. Kids have to be angry enough to want to change the way their elders behave and only when we come to clean the river and environment around us do they begin to be deeply concerned and think of bringing change.”
In fact each team and members of OCU feel deeply about the dirt they clean up week after week while people living around the river show no responsibility and don’t even join the cleaning drive. They attribute this to the lack of concern of the Dorbar Shnong.