Toiling hard on streets with immense satisfaction

Residents are moved by conservancy workers’ laudable dedication

01/04/2020, SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT,TIRUNELVELI

No one is watching them even from a distance. But the conservancy workers, sporting masks and gloves, clean the garbage scattered everywhere along the almost deserted roads of Drivers’ Colony in NGO Colony. While a male conservancy worker with the long garden broom gathers garbage strewn all around, two female workers collect the degradable and the non-degradable waste in separate bins kept in a battery-operated garbage vehicle.

“Vanakkm Amma... Romba nandri amma,”... the greetings from Drivers’ Colony Residents’ Welfare Association president Nallaperumal diverts the conservancy workers’ attention from collecting the garbage and they reciprocate it with folded hands and broad smile. And their work continues even as everyone is behind doors of this middle class residential area as COVID -19 scare is everywhere.

The conservancy workers, drawing paltry daily wages, start their work at 6 a.m. sharp and the work continues until the target given for them for the day is achieved. Besides cleaning the garbage, the conservancy workers desilt the drainage channels, sprinkle bleaching powder along these desilted drainage channels, spray disinfectants around the wet nauseating silt and their colleagues remove this silt in the lorries once it dries-up.

The cash-starved and short-staffed Corporation has deployed 1,077 conservancy workers in Tirunelveli, Thatchanallur, Palayamkottai and Melapalayam Zones to carry-out the cleaning operations in the wake of the dreaded pandemic threat. Their laudable work attracts everyone’s attention as they, without anything from anyone, concentrate on their work. Since there is no roadside teashop, they have to wait for the arrival of a vendor without stopping their work.

Apart from this routine work, conservancy workers in small groups are taken for cleaning operation and putting lime powder circles in the temporary vegetable markets created with 479 shops to ensure ‘personal distancing’ to avert community transmission of SARS –CoV- 2 virus.

Moreover, the conservancy workers deployed along the streets housing the individuals under home quarantine have to spray disinfectants thrice a day besides the regular work of keeping these areas clean. The increased arrival of the homeless and the labourers to the ‘Amma Unavagam’ has burdened them with more work.

Most of their families have three children and most of them are studying in the schools.

“We’ve told them not to come out of our houses as COVID – 19 threat is everywhere,” the women conservancy workers say even as their work continues.

Though most of these workers are entangled in debt and their borrowings from the local moneylenders continue, there is no sign of worries on their face as they draw immense satisfaction from their work.

“This is the job that feeds us and our families... We should do it with utmost dedication and do it as we do usually even as pandemic threat looms large everywhere now,” the conservancy workers say while leaving the Drivers’ Colony area with the collected garbage even as no one is monitoring them.