Would the New Bengaluru Broom Sweep the City Clean?

Bengaluru: The city of Bengaluru hopes that the new corporation, sworn in after a political tussle between the BJP and the Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) or JDS combine, will hit the ground running.

A few days after becoming Bengaluru's new mayor, Manjunath Reddy, took an oath of a new kind. With the Ganesha festival around the corner, he was at a women's college in Bengaluru appealing to students to use eco-friendly Ganesha idols.

"The Ganesha festival is close. We use plaster of paris that does not melt or decompose. Better than a doing pooja of a painted Ganesha is to do pooja of a mud Ganesha."

A student, Anisha, seems to have imbibed the message. "Water gets polluted because of the Ganesha festival. We want to make it an eco-friendly festival and we are creating awareness for that," she told NDTV.

The new mayor had told NDTV, just after he was sworn in, that his focus would be garbage - and he had also visited a village where the city dumps its waste.

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"We Bengalureans throw the stuff we don't need outside - and then ship it off to a village. When I went there it was horrible. Plastic is a curse to Bengaluru and the whole country. The state has already announced banning plastic less than 40 microns thick. But we are yet to implement the laws," he said.

The members of the Congress student wing, the National Students' Union of India or NSUI, were also present at the event.

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