“Turning Garbage into Gold”: Farooq’s Mission to Clean Verinag & Inspire J&K’s Youth Ideas take a person from one place to another. For this, Farooq sahab is an example for us. Mr Farooq demonstrated how the Waste composting machine in Verinag, Anantnag works automatically. In Verinag, the Samkiti committee is teaching the public about street sanitaion, door to door sanitation and segregating dry and wet waste sanitation. The waste composting machine has two buttons one for telling the machine’s temperature and the other for soil temperature. The soil temperature stays between 55-65 temperature so that no waste component gets burnt, said Farooq. Today we have come to this programme where we have been shown how by putting the vegetable waste from our house into a machine, we can turn it into manure and by putting it around us, we can change the environment and fill the green space, said a girl attending the programme. We have to keep the environment around us clean and tell others to keep the environment clean, this is how we are identified, said one young girl. The more we keep our environment clean, the healthier and better we will be.Our surroundings should remain clean. Just like when vehicles run, the smoke that comes out of them should also be reduced because that also causes a lot of problems, said the girl in J&K. We should not throw the garbage that comes out of our house around us otherwise the situation will get worse. Garbage should be dumped in a place where people are not inconvenienced, This will also keep our environment clean, another person said. The government has brought a vehicle to collect the garbage. It is not necessary that we throw garbage in the drains or in the parks. The garbage collection vehicles go to every place, said a person helping to spread awareness. I want this programme to be shown everywhere so that people become aware how to make their dustbin waste useful, said another girl. I am grateful to respected Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi and Lieutenant Governor Shri Manoj Sinha that today we are going to dispose of the waste through automatic compost wasting machine, with their help we have reached here. Environment is a huge problem all over the world. And as for how to save the environment, we started an initiative from plastic to gold. We also started an initiative for saffron cultivation and went from village to village and started a campaign against polythene, Farooq added. We have faced a lot of challenges and for those challenges we have our waste management manager. Through the machine, how will we convert household waste, hotel waste, resort waste, waste generated in administrative set-ups, food waste into gold in 24 hours? So to fulfill our slogan of ‘Waste into Wealth’ we have designed a machine whose model today is of 10 kgs. Today, we will show you how we can change waste into wealth in 24 hours, Farooq said. I would like to request people that they will have to think about garbage, they will have to think about the environment. This will also change our mind and environment. We don’t call only dirt in society as garbage. We have children who get involved in wrong activities, anti-social activities or anti-national activities.When we engage them in this thing, their ideology will change. We can say that I had a dream that one day I will give shape of gold to the garbage and that day has come true. And today we are changing household waste into useful material, Farooq said.