Two days after parents of children began complaining about the municipality dumping sewage waste from the Kodappamund Channel in a football ground adjoining Shanthi Vijai Girls Higher Secondary School, the Udhagamandalam Municipality has begun cleaning of the ground from Thursday.
Officials said that two trucks and an earth mover were being used to clean the ground, which had become unusable over the last couple of months after the sewage waste from the Kodappamund Channel, which is where the majority of the town’s sewage lines empty into, was dumped in the ground, used by students of the girls school as well as by the children from the Government High School nearby.
The parents were worried that apart from transmitting diseases to their children, bits of broken glasses and shards of plastics fished out from the channel could permanently get embedded in portions of the ground, causing injury to the children.
Municipality officials said that the earth diggers would ensure that all the waste was cleaned thoroughly and that the ground would be returned to its former state. The officials also said that there were plans to level the ground, as it had become uneven due to tourist vehicles being allowed to park there during the summer festival.
“We have disallowed vehicles from parking inside the ground too since Wednesday,” an official from the municipality said.