Residents of Bokhtar, the provincial centre of Tajikistan’s Khatlon Oblast, complain of delays in rubbish collection and filthy streets.
Awazali, a 40-year-old resident of Bokhtar, said the city’s population is growing, but utility workers do not remove rubbish on time.
‘We live in high-rise buildings, the rubbish near our house is rarely picked up. The rubbish bins are full and we have to leave it near the bins, then it scatters on the road,’ the man said.
On social media, residents are posting videos of full and stinking rubbish bins near schools and kindergartens where children walk past. They ask how long will this continue?
Husnigul, another resident, says Bokhtar’s streets and avenues are also not cleaned on time, especially around the markets and the park.
Sabokhat Makhmadaliyeva, another Bokhtar resident, said residents, not utility workers, are to blame for the ‘rubbish problem’.
‘People do not throw their rubbish into special containers, but dump their buckets right by the roadside or near the designated rubbish areas. I am convinced that if people behave neatly, our city will be clean,’ she said.Meanwhile, Khatlon Oblast police said on their Facebook page last month that two officials in Bokhtar had been fined for negligence. One of them, the manager of Bokhtar City Park, had unauthorisedly organised a rubbish dump site in the park. Another official, a city utility worker, was fined for not removing rubbish in a timely manner.
A Bokhtar city administration official told CABAR.asia that the city’s cleanliness is discussed at every government meeting, but the problem has not yet been resolved. Miralisho Saifiddin, an employee of the Bokhtar municipal department, said the utility currently has 21 special vehicles for rubbish collection, of which only 15 are in working condition and the rest are unusable.
Officials at the Bokhtar municipal department also complain that not only the equipment, but also their employees responsible for loading rubbish are poorly motivated to work, as their salaries are too low for such hard and dirty work.
While the city authorities are solving the problems of street cleaning, some people are demanding that residents themselves pay more attention to cleanliness in their city.
Journalist Zulfiya Golubeva started cleaning the neighbourhoods of houses and ditches herself. She believes that residents do not have enough information about the damage caused by rubbish emissions.
‘The problem is that the population is growing, the use of plastic bags and containers, which do not decompose for centuries, is increasing. It is important not only to prevent littering the streets, but also to reduce the use of plastic,’ Golubeva said.
Yokubali Saidov, an environmental expert from Khatlon, believes the impact of emissions, especially plastic ones, will reach people sooner or later, but they don’t take it seriously.
‘There is an opinion in medicine that one of the causes of breast cancer incidence is drinking water from plastic bottles that we throw away. After all, plastic exposed to the sun for a long time becomes more harmful,’ he says.
Yokubali Saidov said the accumulation and decomposition of rubbish in summer becomes a breeding ground for insects and flies and causes an increase in infectious diseases.
‘Of course, this is bad for health. Not only rubbish near houses, but also rubbish in ditches and ditches affects people’s health,’ Saidov said.
According to official data, the population of Bokhtar is now 130,000.
According to the city administration, 15 years ago there were 270 high-rise buildings in Bokhtar, and now there are almost 500. Officials say the city’s population is growing, but the number of vehicles and other equipment used to clean the city has not increased since then.