ASIA'S CLEANEST
VILLAGE
G'day folks,
One of the biggest scourges in Asia is the constant use of plastic bags. However ...
From discarded
plastic bottles and wrappers to the cow dung littering the streets of major
cities like Delhi, trash is a big problem in India, but not in the small
village of Mawlynnong. People here have zero tolerance for garbage
and spend a lot of their time making sure every square inch of their village is
spotless.
Mawlynnong
first made news headlines in 2003, when a journalist from Discover Magazine
dubbed it “Asia’s cleanest village”.
After hearing about this place where
everyone, from young children to the elderly, was dedicated to maintaining
a state of complete cleanliness, he decided to investigate, and was so
impressed by what he witnessed during his stay that he deemed Mawlynnong
worthy of the title of cleanest village in all of Asia. His article drew a lot
of attention to the community of around 600 people in the Indian state
of Meghalaya, and people from all over the world started traveling there
to see this example of cleanliness for themselves.
It all sounds like a clever marketing gimmick
to attract tourism, but Mawlynnong is much more than that. For as
long as the locals can remember, keeping their village squeaky clean and
beautiful has been everyone’s top priority. No one knows exactly how this
obsession with cleanliness began. Some believe that it was an outbreak of
cholera, some 130 years ago, when cleanliness was encouraged to stop the
disease from spreading, while others credit the traditionally matrilineal
society of the local Khasi people, with the dominant role of women as the main
driver for cleanliness and sanitation. One thing is for sure, though, these
values have been passed down from the elderly to the young, for generations.
You’re
probably wondering how clean Mawlynnong really is, right? It’s really,
really clean, thanks to a very simple yet effective system that involves
everyone in the community. Every morning, all the children in the village pick
up their teasel brooms and sweep the streets of dirt and fallen leaves –
there’s not much else – before going to school. They are also responsible for
emptying the bamboo trash baskets and separating the waste into organic
matter, reusable plastic and burnable garbage.
Collected leaves are buried in a large pit and
turned into compost, most of the plastic is repurposed within the community,
and the rest is burned on the outskirts of the village. Smoking and the use of
plastic are actually banned in the village, but some plastic does end up in the
collected trash, from tourists. They are also the ones who sometimes litter,
but the locals never scold them for it. Instead, they just pick up after them,
making sure that their home remains as pristine as ever.
Mawlynnong is
one of the very few Indian communities where every household has its own
toilet, making open defecation a non-issue.
The whole village runs almost exclusively on
clean energy, mostly solar, and employs teams of dedicated gardeners that
ensure that the beautiful flowers and plants lining the roads and alleys are
well taken care of.
And it’s not
just the public areas of Mawlynnong that are incredibly clean and tidy.
The same can be said for every household in the village, as this BBC article
points out. The importance of cleanliness is so deeply embedded in the culture
of this place that you can see it in everything and everyone.
Clancy's comment: Wow, more power to them.
I'm ...
