Pupils of the Mandal Praja Parishad primary school at Achayyapeta have found some new “toys” to play with. During the recess and after school , the boys and girls run to the garbage dumps less than 350 meters away and search and pick up used injection syringes and IV fluid sets and start playing by filling them up with water.
Their parents, mostly away from the village rearing sheep or working on fields, are genuinely worried about the children contracting diseases. For the villagers, who are fighting all out to stop the Anakapalle Municipality from dumping the town’s garbage in their village, the threat to their children’s health appears to be the immediate major problem even as they wait for the High Court to give them a favourable verdict. The medical waste is part of garbage forcibly dumped on a site allotted to the municipality as a dumping yard on March 20 after chasing away the protesting villagers and arresting 20 of them.
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Anakapalle Municipal staff are reported now trying to collect medical waste from the dump, in a piece in The Hindu (http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Visakhapatnam/anakapalle-municipal-staff-try-to-collect-medical-waste/article4616896.ece)
As always, that’s an intervention too late, and or course is particularly dangerous for those who will pick through the dump to retrieve hazardous items.