2.20pm: Trinamool’s rally ends.
2.40pm: Cleaners from the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) enter the rally site. Plastic glasses, biscuit and soft drink packets are strewn across the site.
3.30pm: The stretch of Central Avenue between the KC Das crossing and Victoria House, the rally venue, was free of garbage.
The KMC deployed about 300 cleaners across central Calcutta and some other locations to remove the waste generated by rallyists.
“Our focus was on the streets around the rally site and the roads around the Victoria Memorial and the Alipore zoo. We had deployed about 300 people to clean these places,” said Debabrata Majumdar, the mayoral council member in charge
of the KMC’s solid waste management department and Trinamool MLA from
Jadavpur.
A senior KMC official said personnel of the solid waste management department deployed in wards in central Calcutta were assigned the task of cleaning the rally venue. The men completed their morning waste collection task before arriving at the rally site and on the roads around the site.
A section of rally-goers usually visits some of the prominent sites in the city, such as the Victoria Memorial and the Alipore zoo, before or after the event. So cleaning personnel were deployed on roads around these sites.
“Those who came by bus ate their lunch in the bus. But many of them dropped the packets on the road. The cleaning staff picked up those packets, too,” the official said.
Plastic plates and glasses, paper boxes and leftover food items formed the bulk of the waste that was removed.
The 300-strong KMC contingent was divided into small teams. A KMC worker on Red Road said he was in a team of 22 people assigned to clean the area. “We started work at 3pm,” he said.
Jitendra Rajbangshi, 38, a KMC contractual worker deployed in the Maidan area, said the volume of waste dumped on roads was less than last year.
A south Calcutta resident said he saw food packets on a stretch of Palm Avenue from where a number of Trinamool supporters boarded vehicles to head to Esplanade.
Majumdar said if any waste remained on the road, it would be removed on Monday morning.
