Urban Health Hazard in Tajik Town

Residents of Khorog, the main town of Badakhshan province in southeast Tajikistan, complain that the urban environment is increasingly unhealthy because piles of rubbish are piled up everywhere.

Even where bins are available, they are not emptied regularly, and the rubbish poses the threat of diarrhoea and other diseases.

Municipal officials admit that the rubbish collection service is finding it hard to cope, both because it lacks equipment and because the low pay on offer is not much of an incentive.

Khorog’s deputy mayor Abdullo Khudoberdiev blames residents themselves for not taking care of the urban environment, saying they dump their rubbish wherever they want. 

This audio programme, in Russian and Tajik, went out on national radio stations in Tajikistan, as part of IWPR project work funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.