We bathe twice a day, wear clean clothes and keep our homes neat and tidy.
But when it comes to public sanitation, the people in Kerala know differently. They do not mind throwing garbage on roads, or even to the nearby empty plots. And blame the civic authorities for not keeping the place clean.
This double standard of Keralites stems more from their scant regard for their fellow citizens, reveals the DC C-fore survey, shedding light on this strange behavior pattern found in a majority of the residents here.
Of the participants, 29 per cent said that Keralites do not bother about others and that is the reason why we find piles of garbage in front of gates while the house and its premises would be thoroughly clean.
“Only Malayalees would take such pains to tie the waste so securely in plastic bags and deposit it on roads even when there is a waste bin in the nearby junction. We are only interested in keeping our house neat,” says Mr Robin Alex, a resident of Thevara.
This behavior also stems from Malayalees’ reluctance to pay someone to collect garbage, feel 23 per cent of participants. Such expense is considered unnecessary, they said.
Twenty per cent of the participants believe that the garbage menace results from the lack of a recycling concept.
“If Kerala has a good system to recycle waste materials, this issue would not have blown up so much. What we need is a network of recycling units to avoid the garbage piles on roadsides. Not many realise that such piling of waste mean serious health problems too,” says Dr Ashitha Mani, a resident of Edappally.
This view is underlined by the opinion of 12 per cent of participants who maintained that the people in Kerala are unaware of the health implications of this problem. And 16 per cent clearly stated that Keralites have no sense of the menace.
