HCF @Kadalekaye Parishe

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 Kadalekai Parishe, also known as the groundnut festival, is a two-day annual fair in Bengaluru, India that celebrates the first groundnut crop of the year.  The festival takes place near the Dodda Ganesha Temple in Basavanagudi, and at Malleshwaram. The parishe is visited by lakhs of people from across Bangalore and typically vendors freely give out plastic covers for the groundnuts sold.

 The Zero-Waste Collective is a voluntarily driven group of organisations, citizens and volunteers working towards low-waste events in public spaces and temples. The collective came together to make sure the Kadalekayi Parishe is a zero waste, plastic free event this year!

The collective planned the event carefully, and involved the educational institutions, RWAs and citizen communities. There was a concerted effort to make the Parishe plastic free - by collectively making paper bags and cloth bags to be given to the vendors. The awareness was created on social media and broadcast media too - to encourage people to bring their own bags, with the broader objective to reduce pollution and litter.

In the year 2024 alone, due to enthusiastic support of the HSR community, HSR Citizen Forum(as a part of Zero Waste Collective) donated 19000 paper bags and 1000 cloth bags at the Kadalekayi Parishe. This directly translates to about 20000 plastic bags off the landfills and water bodies - an enormous contribution to reduction of carbon footprint.

The kind of support from the community is overwhelming, and we look forward to many more years of participation in such collective efforts - and create awareness and directly contribute to making our environment plastic free!