In a citizen-led initiative to strengthen the Mysuru City Corporation’s (MCC) cleanliness drive, the Mysore Grahakara Parishat (MGP) has proposed recruiting at least 10,000 school students as ‘Mysuru Clean City Wardens’ to promote civic responsibility and discourage littering across the city. The proposal will be discussed at the MGP’s monthly meeting on August 9.

The initiative comes at a time when the MCC has intensified its Swachh Mysuru campaign by taking up the transformation of 80 garbage vulnerable points (GVPs) as part of the country’s 80th Independence Day celebrations. MCC has urged citizens to actively support its ‘Swachh’ efforts, noting that garbage collection from residential areas has improved and that a 100-tonne-per-day Construction and Demolition (C&D) Waste Treatment Plant is being established at Sathagalli. The MGP, however, stressed that public participation is crucial to sustaining these gains.

MGP founding-working president Bhamy V. Shenoy said the student wardens would not only be encouraged to refrain from littering themselves but also persuade others to keep public places clean and report littering incidents to the MCC so that violators could be penalised. “The involvement of young people will act as a deterrent,” he said.

According to the MGP, the proposed programme requires neither additional funding nor diversion of classroom time. Instead, it seeks to inculcate civic values among students while encouraging them to influence their families, friends and neighbourhoods to maintain cleanliness in public spaces.

The MGP, in a release, said it had launched the ‘Clean Mysuru City’ campaign involving more than 15 schools in 2025 and now plans to scale it up with the participation of educational institutions such as Lions Sevaniketan, Excel Public School, Vijaya Vittala School, Orchids School, Bogadi, Sadvidya High School, Anantha Geetha Vidyalaya, Mahajana School and Pragathi School, besides MCC executive engineer Mruthunjaya. The meeting will deliberate on strategies to involve students in the campaign.

Dr. Shenoy also referred to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent appreciation of Mysuru’s cleanliness during the inauguration of the Viveka Smaraka and said the Prime Minister’s call for greater youth participation and involvement in keeping the city clean.

The meeting will be held at MGP’s office at 6/1 on Vivekananda Road at Yadavagiri here on August 9 at 4 p.m. Interested persons can dial 0821-2515150.

Published - August 04, 2026 07:27 pm IST