Plastic free Chilkur temple -Visa Balaji

Chilkur, the home of ‘Visa Balaji’, became ‘plastic-free’, by a pilot project initiated by the Temple Management Committee making available to thousands of devotees bags made of handloom cloth supplied by APCO.
Coinciding with the Independence Day, a new environment-friendly tradition came into existence at the Chilkur Balaji temple, known for its unique system of worship with no ‘Hundi’ collections or ‘VIP darshan’. ‘Say No to Plastic’ , the pilot scheme taken up by the Chilkur Balaji temple to allow only handloom bags and launched on Saturday, saw sale of 15,000 handloom bags out of 20,000 bags sourced by it. The scheme got all the encouragement from the State government and Apco which supplied the handloom scrap at 80 per cent subsidy for making the bags. The first day sees sale of 15,000 handloom bags

“The decision to meet the objectives of helping the traditional handloom weavers and doing our bit to protect environment by eliminating non bio-degradable plastic bags, evoked cooperation from devotees and vendors,” said temple hereditary trustee and Protection of Temples Movement convenor M.V.Soundar Rajan. Dr. Soundar Rajan said that over 100 vendors who sell ‘puja’ material on the temple premises switched over to handloom bags.

The temple attracts about 6,000 devotes on normal days and 15,000 to 20,000 devotees on week-ends and its annual consumption of handloom cloth is around two lakh metres. Apart from Apco, the cloth is also sourced from Sircilla Handloom Weavers Society directly without any subsidy and is given to the ‘Mahila Pranganam’ members to stitch the bags. If government extended the subsidy scheme to other cooperative societies, the cost of bags can be further brought down.
The biggest temple in the world , famous Balaji Temple, Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, should also make Tirumala as ‘plastic-free’

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