‘Runspection’ to identify black spots in city

Y. Maheswara Reddy | NT

Bengaluru: Residents of Mahadevapura have celebrated Republic Day in a unique way. They inspected 26 km of streets in the area for cleanliness.

The “runspection” event was called Mahadevapura26K, and was part of the CleanStreet50KChallenge taken up by Mahadevapura, to ensure 50 km of streets stay clean in a sustained way. The event was conducted in partnership with The Ugly Indians, and CleanStreetRunners.

#CleanStreetRunners is a community of runners who run the city streets to rate them for cleanliness. Many short runs have been conducted along with BBMP Marshals in the last three months. However this 26 km challenge was considered the biggest and longest. On December 9, a pilot project was conducted on a 8-km loop at Doddanekundi. On the first Inspection Run (Or Runspection), 85 problem spots were identified, photographe and mapped by the runners.

These included garbage spots, debris spots, silt on roads as well as dug-up roads and incomplete projects - anything that made the streets feel unclean and unsafe for pedestrians and runners. The BBMP challenged the runners to run again 10 days later - and when they did, just 3-4 of these 85 spots were visible; the rest had been addressed successfully.

On the 26 km run, the runners covered the 8 km of Doddanekundi and another 18 km in ITPL, Kadugodi, Hoodi, Hagadur and Whitefield. They spotted about 35 garbage spots and about 140 debris spots. They plan to run the same route again in two to three weeks and record the improvement.

A volunteer from Team Ugly Indians said that the larger benefit of these Runspection events is that the public is invited for an honest objective inspection where they can give a rating to a street. “As far as we know this does not happen anywhere else in India, or in any other country. This is a joint exercise with Marshals and frontline BBMP staff, with the common aim of solving problems. There is no substitute to actually going on the streets with local BBMP teams, and we are optimistic that this will change the entire paradigm of how street cleanliness is achieved,’’ he said.

A runner from CleanStreetRunners said: We have mapped 500 km of city streets in 50 loops (of average 10km each). Our aim is to run each of these loops over the coming months, in coordination with local BBMP and Marshal teams. All the runs are videographed, and the footage is made available to all on the social media and YouTube channels of CleanStreet- Runners. This initiative is called Let’s Run Bengaluru!

“It is a good event. The participants have mapped black spots. The objective is to ensure coordination between residents and BBMP authorities. Beautification of a few black spots has already begun,” said Clement Jayakumar of Mahadevapura Task Force.