How Cloth no finds a mention in Mann ki baat

Prime minister Narendra Modi in Mann on Sunday lauded the efforts in embracing the cloth bag culture instead of polythene bags. The prime minister also mentioned the intense garbage segregation efforts being carried out. People here are campaigning against single use plastic products to keep the environment clean. Along with this, these people are also spreading awareness to segregate the waste at home. Apart from its ongoing efforts to achieve 100% door to door garbage segregation and home composting, the launched a special awareness campaign in the name of cloth bag challenge. Tens of awareness sessions were conducted at various schools, colleges and public places like  on the ill effects of plastic bags and how the students and the general places can conserve the environment by shifting to the usage of reusable cloth bags. As part of the campaign took the help of the resident welfare association, and other  city for a wider reach. The corporation also roped in all the senior officials in the district to further propagate the message. The leveraged its social media handles for this purpose and posted videos containing messages given by district collector, and higher cleanliness activities as well as cloth bag challenge. Their cooperation and commitment have only brought this recognition to the city. Now, the planning to reach out  to make a plastic free City in the next one year.  3500 students from nearly 75 schools prepared nearly 6000 bags as part of the cloth bag challenge. Our plan is to encourage more students and parents. A part of the challenge, the students to prepare a cloth  bag either by using unused clothes, pillow covers, and T-shirts, or by taking a  cloth bag on which they need to make embroidery works or paint quotations related to the environment. Since the last one week,  children from many schools have been participating in the challenge and are posting their videos online, tagging it to the  social media accounts. We need to start creating awareness over plastic ban, its harmful side and its alternatives right from the school age. There are around 25,000 school students in the city. If we could involve children in such a fight against plastic, their parents may also get involved.  Number of students from GVMC as well as other schools from the city are preparing cloth bags using waste clothes with the help of their parents. The videos are being shared with us daily. The response is  we would also like participants and award them in different categories like best use of old clothes,  cloth bags and  the Commissioner added. GVMC officials have also sought the help of Resident Welfare Association  NGOs and associations to fight the plastic menace. A few RWA members asked the GVMC Commissioner to conduct awareness campaigns through ward  over the usage of cloth bags. GVMC is also mulling to give a time of around two months for the shopkeepers and other merchants to shift to alternatives for plastic bags. The corporation would start enforcing the plastic ban.