Communities team up to clean river
WITH inter-community violence reported from many parts of India in a society increasingly polarised on religious and caste lines, a small town in Uttar Pradesh is setting an extraordinary example.
Here a temple, a mosque and even a gurdwara have joined hands to clean a polluted river while bringing their communities together.
About 100km from the state capital, Lucknow, is the town Maholi in the district, Sitapur.
Here lies an old Shiva and a Radha-Krishna temple along with Pragyana Satsang Ashram and a mosque.
Along the periphery of this campus passes a polluted river called Kathina, that merges into the highly-polluted Gomti River, a tributary of the Ganga.
Often used as dumping site, the stink from Kathina was increasing daily.
“The river belongs to everyone. Hindus use it for aachman (a Hindu ritual for spiritual purification) and Muslims use it for wazu or ablution. People had been dumping solid and bio waste here and also doing open defecation. The only solution was to start cleaning it ourselves,” said Swami Vigyananad Saraswati, head of the Pragyana Satsang Ashram, as he inspected the river with Muhammad Haneef, head of the mosque’s managing committee.
Saraswati said that once the ashram and temple administration began rallying volunteers for the cleaning drive, the mosque also came to help. Even Maholi’s Sikh gurudwara committee brought volunteers.
The actual cleaning of the river began from March 17, when about 400 volunteers got into the waters, while about 700 of them cleaned the shores. – IANS