Himalayan News Service

Bhaktapur, February 27:

Bhaktapur municipality has started clearing waste from the Araniko highway — along the section that lies in the municipality. “We have begun clearing garbage along some three kilometres of the highway, from Sallaghari to Suryabinayak,” said executive head of Bhaktapur municipality, Lok Nath Poudel. The cleaning of the highway could take a few days, and Poudel said the municipality would try and clean the highway on a regular basis. The reason behind the highway clean-up drive? Poudel said the municipality wanted to keep Bhaktapur’s suburbs and roads leading to it as clean as the inner areas of the city. Some 217 persons are responsible to keep the city areas clean.

Poudel said the municipality is planning to provide awareness training to Bhaktapur locals in the near future, while including the private sector to work in the sanitation sector and public-private partnership.

At present, some 22 tonnes of the municipality’s garbage is being dumped at Bhelukhel, Bhaktapur-11. The garbage is kept in a compost plant for proper decomposing. It is then used to fill in the low lands.

For a permanent solution, a sanitation landfill site is under construction at Tathali.