Two days ago, 100-year-old Jagjivan Mistry woke up in the early hours, got ready, and left his house in Marol to join a community initiative. He reached Seven Hills Hospital in Andheri’s Marol area in the morning and waited for his friends to show up. That day, a bunch of senior citizens from the suburbs of Mumbai came together to participate in a marathon to press for a cleaner, greener city. As the youngsters ran in the ‘Dream Marol Marathon’, the senior citizens participated in a walkathon.
“Marol is full of narrow roads, encroachments, drainage issues, contaminated water. There are no proper garbage pickups. We wanted to do something to try and bring focus on getting clean roads, proper drainage, removal of encroachments, and waste management,” Mistry said. Barely four kilometres away from the Mumbai international airport, Marol is a densely populated suburb of Andheri in Mumbai, with over 1.38 lakh population.
Littered roads, encroachments on footpaths, lack of open spaces — particularly for children — are some of the problems these Mumbaikars face. But the community has now decided that it will come together to act on it. Residential complexes, shops and establishments, schools, colleges, and religious organisations have joined hands for sustainable and clean living in the suburb aimed towards ‘Dream Marol’.
“As the first step, we organised a local marathon called ‘Dream Marol Run’ and a cleanathon on January 29 at Marol. We wanted to get every citizen to adhere to certain norms of clean living. We wanted to highlight duties and responsibilities. Our objective is to create a Model Township at Marol,” Suresh Nair, founder of ‘Dream Marol’, said. Over 1,500 people participated in the marathon and the cleanathon thereafter.
“This is an interesting experiment of a bottom-up initiative of urban planning and with the right partners and right projects, this will definitely become a replicable model for the rest of the city and the country at large,” said Parthsarathy Natarajan, a communications specialist residing in Marol.
Over the next few years, the community initiative plans to hold outreach programmes for inculcating habits of waste segregation and cleanliness among the residents. The two big problems — sanitation and lack of open spaces — will also be taken up on priority basis.
“There are no public toilet facilities for the working population, particularly for the women. That needs to change. We have been raising the issue with the BMC. We are also in the process of tapping all the garden plots to develop them as community spaces. Our children need open spaces to play,” Nair said.
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