Volunteers urge people not to pollute Yamuna with puja items (Hindustant Times 02 April 2012)

Taking a small step to prevent the Yamuna from getting more polluted, volunteers of a non government organisation stopped people from throwing puja items into the river on Sunday. According to Gopi Dutt Aakash, founder member and president of Youth Fraternity Foundation (YFF), an NGO Working to same Yamuna from pollution, hundreds of tonnes of plastic and other pollution material find their way into the river during the festival season.
“During last Navratras in October 2011, an estimated six lakh kilograms of puja items was thrown into River Yamuna in Delhi alone. We want to create a system where the sacred waste is collected directly and disposed of and recycled properly without causing any pollution in the river,” Aakash said.
Under the project ‘Pushpanjali Pravah’, the volunteers of YFF collected two truckloads of sacred waste from Yamuna Bridge on Vikas Marg on Saturday. The NGO put up banners on the iron grille along the bridge, requesting people not to throw any waste in the river.
Aakash said that they wanted to run the campaign on all the six road bridges on the Yamuna in Delhi but could only do it at Vikas Marg due to shortage of manpower. Short on resources, the volunteers let people dispose of biodegradable waste in the river and collected the non-biodegradable waste such as plastic and cloth.
“We make bags of cloth and plastic and agarbattis and manure out of flowers,” Aakash said.
We want to create a system where the sacred waste is collected diretly.
Volunteers stop people from throwing puja items into the river; banners were put up along the grille, requesting people to preserve Yamuna