Kota takes help of selfies to promote green campaign
I borrowed over 200 plants from the Kota Municipal Corporation and distributed them among my friends. Together, we have planted 10 saplings to create awareness
The Kota district administration has started a unique campaign, selfie with plantation, to promote greenery in the city.
Kota Smart City Limited (KSCL), a company formed by the Kota Municipal Corporation (NMC), and the district administration has developed a mobile app named ‘Smart Kota’ for implementation of the centre government’s Smart City project.
Under selfie with plantation drive, residents have been asked to take a selfie with plantation work done by them and upload them on the Smart Kota app. It will show the person’s selfie, along with location of the plantation, on Google map of Kota, said Rohit Gupta, district collector, Kota. The administration will also felicitate people and organisations doing maximum plantation on the Independence Day, he added.
Giving more information about the campaign, PK Garg, superintendent engineer, KSCL, said an official sitting in the KSCL control room will verify authenticity of the selfie before it will get uploaded on the Google map. He said more than 500 people have already downloaded the Smart Kota app since its launch on July 30. “More than 100 persons, government departments and organisations have clicked their selfie with plantation on the app,” he added. A total of more than 1,500 plants have been planted under the drive in Kota so far, he claimed.
“A new feature of ‘Plantation Leaderboard’ has also been added recently to the app, through which people, departments, organisations doing maximum plantations in a day are shown as ‘plantation leader’ for the day,” he added.
Jarnail Singh Brar, an advocate of Sirsa district in Haryana who is residing in Kota to support his children taking coaching classes in Kota, has sent more than 150 entries through the Smart Kota app.
“I plan trees in Haryana every year during monsoon and now when I am in Kota, I decided to do the same here, for which I bought saplings for ₹2,000 and planted them in different locations of Kota,” he said.
Sachin Arora, an employee in the local court in Kota who has also sent entries through the app, said, “I borrowed over 200 plants from the Kota Municipal Corporation and distributed them among my friends. Together, we have planted 10 saplings to create awareness about plantation,” he said. “I was amazed to see my selfie with plantation on the Google map,” he said.
Kota, along with Jaipur, Udaipur and Ajmer, is among the four cities selected in Rajasthan under the ‘Smart City’ project. Under Mukhyamantri Swawlamban Abhiyan (MJSA), the Kota administration has been given a target of planting is five lakh saplings, while local self bodies have been asked to plant 5,000 saplings.