Massive clean up after India's Hindu mega-festival ends

Thousands of sanitation workers were toiling on Friday to clean up 20,000 tonnes of waste left behind by hundreds of millions of Hindu devotees after India's Kumbh Mela mega-festival.

The massive sanitation drive has been underway since the six-week gala drew to a close last week in the northern city of Prayagraj.

Hundreds of millions of people visited the city during the festival according to government figures, with mounds of discarded clothing, plastic bottles and other waste now littering the grounds. 

"We have deployed 15,000 workers to clear up some 20,000 tonnes of waste generated from the festival," Prayagraj municipal commissioner Chandra Mohan Garg told AFP.

The Kumbh Mela is the single biggest milestone on the Hindu religious calendar, staged every 12 years at the holy confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati rivers.

It is rooted in Hindu mythology, a battle between deities and demons for control of a pitcher containing the nectar of immortality.

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Workers were also busy dismantling a temporary infrastructure, that includes 150,000 portable toilets.

In several places, open areas were used as makeshift toilets, posing a challenge to the army of sanitary staff. 

"The dedication towards cleanliness... will continue to inspire efforts to keep Prayagraj, and its sacred rivers, clean for generations to come," the government said in a statement this week.

The Kumbh Mela was also a testament to the "collective spirit of maintaining a cleaner and more sustainable environment", it added.

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