Celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi environment friendly
Festivals in India are generally celebrated with all the frills, and the same is true for Ganesh Chaturthi. Right from handpicking flowers and decking up puja rooms and pandals, to making modaks filled with coconut and jaggery, people tend to immerse themselves in a host of activities.
However, often, during the course of the celebration, we don’t realise the extent of harm we might be causing to the environment.
Many of the Ganesha idols that are sold in the market today are made of plastic, thermocol, PoP, and other non-boidegradable materials, which when immersed in water bodies have a detrimental effect on both the plant and animal life.
Even the rangoli colours available in the market, which are used for decorative purposes, are likely to be made up of hazardous substances like mica, acids, and glass powders. Since these colours cannot be decomposed biologically, they tend to degrade the surrounding spaces.
It might not sound very significant, but even the plastic used to pack or give away the prasad, adds to the existing pollution in the environment.
Hence, this time around, let’s look at some ways in which you can celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi with all the pomp and ceremony, but without hurting the planet.
Jubel D’Cruz
Amalgamation of major banks comes as a surprise
The yet another announcement to amalgamate major banks comes as a surprise as also one understands that such a decision has been taken cautiously by the Ministry of Finance in recent years. The move for such a decision has been cited to infuse capital into the banks as the economy now is staring gloomy picture in the markets. Through such a restructuring exercise to minimize bad loans and NPA mess apart from economic crisis, one will not be surprised if more such plan are implemented in future and set a trend with the concept of amalgamated banking system in the coming years.
It needs to be seen as to how quickly and effective such an amalgamated banking entity will penetrate into the businesses, citing common operational framework, as all the banks share a common banking software. It also needs to be seen as how well the Government, RBI and BBB will convince the the such a mammoth bank restructuring exercise to the end customers, the employees, the banking union etc. to move into such a new type of amalgamated banking entity.
Varun Dambal
(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
