BySiddhi Jain

July 10, 2020 (IANSlife) Doing her bit to protect the environment, producer Pragya Kapoor has joined hands with Healing Himalayas, a collective that works on waste management in villages and trekking trails of hilly regions, to build waste collection centres in Himachal Pradesh. Her goal? "Make our paradise as sustainable as we can." 

Though her NGO 'Ek Saath: The Earth Foundation', Kapoor, who is the wife of director Abhishek Kapoor, and team plan to build the first centre at one of Himalayas remote villages called Rakcham.

The project, which is called Sustaining Paradise, aims at promoting sustainable tourism and helping the locals manage their waste. 

"Whenever we visit a place as a tourist, we admire the beauty and atmosphere around, but what most of us don't realise is that we leave that place with some environmental hazards, by littering or throwing waste at the wrong places during our journey. With this initiative we plan to manage that waste, if nothing, in the recent lockdown the nature has shown all of us the injustice we have been doing to it.

"I am glad that 'Ek Saath' is associating with Healing Himalayas for this amazing initiative purely because currently, the locals in Rakcham village don’t have any facilities to dispose off their waste, hence they end up burning it, causing a major environmental hazard. Sometime last year, a destination wedding had left tonnes of garbage in the hills, which only caused damage to the environment, we need to stop this carelessness. So, a waste collection centre will help the locals segregate their waste and send it for recycling to bigger cities like Shimla. It will reduce the pollution caused by trekkers and tourists," Kapoor told IANSlife in an email.

According to Pradeep Sangwan, environmentalist and the founder of Healing Himalayas, the initiative will also have workshops for the locals to educate and encourage them to sustain the landscape and the environment surrounding them. Sangwan and his team work tirelessly around the year attempting to clean the treks, conducting other clean-up drives and also look into the waste management in the foothills of Himalayas. 

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Siddhi Jain can be contacted at siddhi.j@ians.in