[Rinkeliacasse]

Volunteers of the Chennai Trekking Club (CTC), along with likeminded citizens, undertook a Chennai coastline clean-up project and cleaned the 15-km stretch from Marina Lighthouse to Injambakkam and collected 17.6 tonne of garbage in 1,765 biodegradable bags on Sunday.

Following Chennai mayor Mr Saidai Duraisamy inaugurating the clean-up campaign-3 at Besant Nagar North Beach, hundreds of Chennaiites started picking up garbage along the coastal zones from 5.45 am. The campaign ended at 9.15 am.

Employees from corporate companies like Cognizant Technologies, Nokia, Dover, Logica and members of organisations like the Inner Wheel Club, Gnana Deepam Trust, SVCE Alumni Association also took part.

Dr Bhavana Upadhyaya, an academician and a volunteer with CTC told this newspaper that 2,369 volunteers took part in the clean-up campaign after 3,500 had registered for it on their website. “We were surprised to see so many turning up to cleanup the coastline,” she said, lauding the students of from Sunshine Academy and Karapakkam High School who cleaned up the stretches at Pallavakam and Kottivakam coastal zones respectively.

According to Dr Bhavana, 350 bags were collected from the Broken Bridge, the most littered area, while the least (55 bags) was collected from the Kottivakam beach zone.

Lighthouse, Besant Nagar north, Pallavakam south, Neelankarai north and Injambakkam were the other zones from where the volunteers collected more than 100 bags (each Biotec-bag weighing 10 kg) of garbage.

Lyricist and dialogue writer Mr Madhan Karky Vairamuthu and his wife Ms Nandini Karky, who joined the volunteers at Neelangarai beach, said that they felt great after doing their part in cleaning the beach despite the grogginess from waking up early in the morning.

-dc chn