Farmers Movement Archive

‘Locals shouldn’t be disgusted’: How farmers are keeping Singhu border neat and clean during protests

Accompanied by about 15 people, Jugraj Singh Jaggi begins cleaning the Singhu Border protest site at 10 am and continues till 5 pm every day. Jaggi and the others have continued the sanitation drive everyday for the last fortnight, but he understands that the effort may not be enough. “I am trying to ensure that when we leave the place one day, local residents don’t look at us with disgust for leaving the road in a mess,” said Jaggi, who belongs to Mundh village in Punjab’s Jalandhar. Also Read | A month on, farmers have made highway their homeJaggi and his friends took up this task when they realised that the while langars were being organised on a large scale, the farmers were not doing anything about the garbage. “Local residents had begun complaining,” said Jaggi. So, he and his friends procured brooms, dustpans and large blue dustbin bags and donned half jackets of matching colours to begin the exercise. But the task wasn’t like anything they expected. “On the first day we brought 500 large dustbin bags, but they were grossly inadequate. Next day we had to equip ourselves with 1,000 bags,” said Jaggi, adding that the cleaning exercise involved fixing these bags outside trucks and trolleys to ensure farmers did not dump garbage on the roads. Jaggi and the others have divided them into small groups and divided zones among themselves to ensure cleaning of larger areas. “We have also arranged trolleys to take away the garbage and dump them in designated dump yards, some as far as 10 kilometers from here,” said Jaggi.

Hindustan Times

28-12-2020

India