Keralite Ganga to be face of TN's war on waste
Ganga Dileep, who has spearheaded many innovative initiatives including the successful Toilet Tales, (an initiative that maps public toilets in Thiruvananthapuram) in Pune and other parts of Kerala got this opportunity to work in Chennai from 2022.
Since then, a team led by Ganga has been working on various verticals of four slum rehabilitation projects in Chennai. 'I have worked in the constituency of Udayanidhi Stalin and we recovered a canal and helped rehabilitate the slum dwellers.
The Clean Tamil Nadu Company will work as a strategic and administrative backbone, providing leadership, policy direction, framing and approving guidelines along with inter-departmental coordination. This is a special and challenging opportunity for me,' said Ganga.
Born and brought up in Thiruvananthapuram, Ganga is the founder of Green Army under Thiruvananthapuram City Corporation - a voluntary-based initiative that promotes green protocol.
'The main challenge will be to bring together all the stakeholders, especially the informal sector in sanitation and waste management in Tamil Nadu. There are over 12,000 local self-government institutions in the state and unlike Kerala, the urban-rural divide is evident here. Urban areas like Chennai are densely populated, and compared with other metro cities and rural areas, have better waste management practices,' she said.
'I began my career in Kerala and the experience I gained from here is the foundation. Both the states are different and here the main difference I noticed is that Kerala is more into planning and here they focus on implementation. Both planning and implementation are important for any initiative to succeed,' she added.
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