Sanitation workers with the Indore Municipal Corporation pulled off a small feat of honesty and diligence this week, tracking down a silver pot worth roughly Rs 5 lakh that had accidentally been thrown out with household garbage. The nearly 2-kilogram silver vessel, packed inside a plastic bag, was recovered safe and sound after a search that stretched across nearly 24 hours, from a residential lane all the way to a modern garbage processing plant, before finally being handed back to its elderly owner.
Two identical bags, one costly mix-up
The trouble began on Friday morning when a woman at the house was going about her regular cleaning. Two plastic bags had been left outside the home, and because they looked almost exactly alike, she could not tell that one of them contained the family's silver pot rather than ordinary trash. Without realising her mistake, she handed both bags over to the municipal garbage collection vehicle that came by that morning. In a matter of minutes, an item worth lakhs of rupees was mixed in with the rest of the household's waste, headed for disposal like everything else in the truck.
Panic sets in, a hunt begins
It was only on Friday evening that the family noticed the silver pot was missing, and the realisation set off an immediate scramble. They wasted no time in alerting their ward councillor as well as officials of the municipal corporation, hoping to catch the waste before it went too far. The driver and supervisor of the garbage truck were contacted right away, but the vehicle had, by then, already emptied its load at the Lalbagh transfer station. From there, the same waste had already been forwarded to a dry waste management and recycling facility run by NEPRA, which meant the search now had to extend well beyond the neighbourhood and into an entire processing operation.
CCTV footage cracks the case
Rather than treating the pot as lost for good, officials at the plant turned to CCTV footage to work out exactly which batch of waste needed to be checked. It took hours of careful effort, but at around 10 am on Saturday, sanitation staff sifting through the material being processed finally spotted the silver pot. It had survived the entire journey completely undamaged. Before the item was handed back, municipal officials made sure that all the necessary verification steps were carried out, so that there would be no doubt the pot was going back to its rightful owner.
Mayor, commissioner praise the team
The successful recovery was very much a team effort, involving sanitation workers, truck drivers and municipal officials working together across the two days. Indore Mayor Pushyamitra Bhargava and Municipal Commissioner Kshitij Singhal both praised everyone involved for the diligence they showed in tracking down and returning the family's silver pot.
