Bengaluru will be hosting a city wide ‘plog’ run on Gandhi Jayanti (October 2) this year, in a bid to make the city plastic free. The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) which is officially hosting the event, is aiming for 10,000 volunteers to take part in order to break the Guinness World Record.
So far, the initiative has attracted a lot of high profile personalities including former ace fast bowler Javagal Srinath, actor Samyukta Hornad, actor-director Ramesh Arvind, Mayor Sampath Raj and BJP MLA Ashwath Narayan.
What is plogging?
“Plog run is an initiative to keep your health fit as well as the locality fit. While running, if you can pick up plastic and dispose it to a correct location, then basically you are detoxifying the locality,” says Ramakrishna Ganesh, chief mentor of the event.
Plogging is a portmanteau word formed from jogging and “plocka”, the Swedish word meaning “to pick”, from which the trend originated. It was in 2016, that plogging got into the mainstream in Sweden and started spreading gradually to other parts of the world.
Speaking about it, Ramakrishna said, “I, along with other like minded activists, had started this in Nandi Hills about three-four months ago. At that time, 30 of us were able to clear more than 100 bags of plastic lying on the road. That motivated us and we thought why don't we do something bigger in Bengaluru.”
Steadily the group got bigger and he found support from NGOs like Let’s Be The Change, Go Native (a restaurant) and Namma Nimma Cycle Foundation.
“Then we went to BBMP for support as we wanted to create this awareness and make the community larger. BBMP was more than happy to take this forward along with us,” he says.
“So we are going to do this in 50-plus locations in the city. In each of these centres, plogging will be carried out along a 3km area, so approximately we will cover 150km of Bengaluru's roads. In each of these areas, we will have one champion who will volunteer to motivate and engage the locality,” he added.
If you wish to register for the event, you can click here.
