Two college students were walking along a footpath in Chittagong city recently. While approaching towards Alliance Francaise de Chittagong, they could not but press their palms on the noses to get rid of putrid stench.

On their way homes, there was an open dustbin on KB Fazlul Quader Chowdhury Road.

It was overflowing with garbage and a murder of crows was having a huge feast on it.

Nobody walking past the dustbin dared to keep their noses open.

For the students, Tamanna Chowdhury and Ishrat Jahan, it was not an occasional walk. They have to traverse such an annoying place on a regular basis as they used to live near it.

Similar feature is seen at other dustbins in the port city where hundreds of foreign guests stay.

The city dwellers chucked all types of garbage in the dustbins. Cleaners do not remove the waste on time. Such dustbins are contributing to environmental pollution and subsequently posing a health hazard. Those are eyesores as well.

This has been a common feature for a long time. The two students think that the situation cannot exist in a major city like Chittagong. “We want to breathe fresh air,” said Tamanna. “We want to live in a clean city,” said Ishrat.

During the monsoon, the condition gets worse. The garbage mixed with rainwater stays scattered on roads, making those muddy.

Nurul Alam, a resident of West Bakalia DC Road area, said the dustbin at Chawkbazar Kitchen Market has been causing nuisance for around 40 years.

Filth comes out of it, creating a possibility of infecting pedestrians with various diseases, he said.

The city residents would not have smelled the garbage since April if Chittagong City Corporation had fulfilled its pledge to remove all the dustbins by March.

Nurul Alam said, “We thought our sufferings would come to an end by that time, but to no avail.”

CCC conservancy officials said a total of 1,350 open dustbins and 96 dumpsters had been in the city since the city corporation started removing those on January 31.

But in the last nine months, the CCC was able to remove around less than 30 percent of the dustbins, they said.

On the other hand, it started a door-to-door waste collection on January 1 so that the residents do not dump garbage in the dustbins.

Eventually, it could make Chittagong a clean city where around 2,000 tonnes of waste is produced on a daily basis, said the officials.

To this end, the CCC supplied about 9 lakh bins to households, shops, kitchen markets, businesses and other establishments in all 41 wards.

However, such an initiative could not apparently succeed. Garbage remained uncollected for hours, forcing people to use the street dustbins.

Acknowledging all the facts, Chowdhury Hasan Mahmud Hasni, a CCC panel mayor, said, “We have not achieved 100 percent success in the project yet.”

People's unawareness and some CCC workers' negligence in duty are responsible for this, he said.

“I urge the residents to complain to the ward councillors concerned if the CCC workers are irregular to collect waste,” he said.

About the delay in removing the street dustbins, Shaifiqul Mannan Siddique, chief conservancy officer of CCC, said more than 400 dustbins have been removed since January 31.

“It's a continuous process and we will remove all of those gradually,” he said.