NASHIK: The Ganeshotsav festival is round the corner, and residents are excited to share the 10 days of joy, love, and blessings. However, the rivers face severe pollution due to the immersion process. Plastic bags, ornaments, harmful watercolors, and other items not only degrade the water quality, but the items even choke up the river leading to overflow and possible flooding.
Many organisations come up with various drives to aware citizens of river pollution and guide them to switch to eco-friendly idols. Nishita Kothule (founder, Niche-The pottery studio) has created a win-win situation for the environment and residents by conducting eco-friendly Ganpati-making workshops annually. She started her studio in 2019 and decided to conduct the Ganpati-making workshops in the same year. She received an overwhelming response and decided to conduct workshops for people to enjoy the creation and save the rivers from pollution.
Situated on Gangapur Road, she’s starting her workshops for Ganeshostav 2021 from today. To begin with, she stated that idol making is an easy job and serves loads of benefits. When people start creating idols on their own, they experience satisfaction and comfort. The process is meditating as one indulges him/herself in the making and doesn’t concentrate on anything else.
The most important benefit idol making serves is preventing the environment from getting polluted. The idols can be made of different materials like Shadu soil (Shadu mati), Terracotta clay, or converting garden soil into clay and creating an idol. The best point about these eco-friendly items is that anyone can create an idol irrespective of their creativity level. The idols take about 2 to 2.5 hours to complete, and people can create and add clay ornaments if they wish to decorate their Ganesha.
Visarjan at home
Being a big supporter of carrying out the immersion process at home, she stated that it’s better if people immerse the idols at home; in a bucket or tub. Shadu soil and Terracotta clay don’t dilute with water, and it can lead to choke-ups. It is advisable to do the visarjan at home, collect the slurry, dry it under the sun, and reuse it next year. This way, even the environment will benefit, and people will recycle items.
Tree Ganesha
This year, Nishita came up with Tree Ganesha wherein she used garden soil turned into clay to create Ganesha’s idol and added fruit seeds in the clay. As a result, after visarjan, the leftover clay supports the birth of plant sapling.
Herbal colours
She even stated she’s against the poster and acrylic colours used to paint the idols as they have chemicals, and some are even water insoluble. She added that one should use herbal colours to decorate their Ganesha as it will prevent river pollution/water pollution.
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