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Chandigarh: At a time when garbage heaps have become a depressingly familiar feature across urban India, Chandigarh has devised a refreshingly blunt remedy for litterbugs: those unable to pay the fine for throwing trash in public are made to pick up a broom and clean the mess themselves.

The “City Beautiful,” as Chandigarh styles itself and is long regarded as one of India’s most orderly and well-planned urban spaces, is the first in the country to introduce such a scheme – effectively dragooning litterbugs into garbage-cleaning duties. It is a small but imaginatively significant step that deserves to be widely replicated across India, where mounting waste and casual littering are steadily overwhelming already strained municipal systems.

Under its anti-littering campaign, the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation recently compelled two offenders from the city’s Sectors 25 and 8 – both of whom had been fined Rs 13,401 and Rs 14,071 in December last year – to clean public areas after claiming they were unable to pay the penalties.

Provided gloves, brooms, and other sanitation gear by the city municipal authorities, the two offenders were made to sweep and clear garbage under official supervision – one around the slaughterhouse in the city’s Industrial Area and the other in his own neighbourhood. Operating under the watch of the municipal medical officer, they carried out the cleaning work while their activities were videotaped and documented and detailed reports prepared for submission to the “competent authority,” which will decide whether their fines should eventually be waived.

Municipal Commissioner Amit Kumar said such garbage offenders would not be spared and that requests for penalty waivers would be considered only after “verified completion reports” confirmed that the assigned sanitation work had been adequately executed. “The objective is not only to sensitise citizens about the importance of maintaining cleanliness,” Kumar told The Hindustan Times, adding that offenders who are made to participate in sanitation work quickly realise the effort involved in keeping the city clean. The municipal corporation, he said, was adopting a “zero-tolerance” approach to littering.

In an earlier equally unusual attempt at shaming litterbugs and deterring illegal garbage........

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