Indore (MP), Jul 20 (PTI) In a feat akin to finding a needle in a haystack, civic workers in Madhya Pradesh’s Indore turned treasure hunters, recovering a silver urn, worth nearly Rs 5 lakh, that got accidentally binned and buried under tonnes of garbage, officials said on Monday.
An elderly woman from the city’s Rajendra Nagar area inadvertently tossed a bag containing the 2-kg ancestral heirloom into a municipal garbage truck on July 18, sending municipal workers on a two-day mission to dig through mountains of scrap before metal crushers claimed it at a waste-processing facility, they said.
According to officials, the urn, preserved as a family heirloom and used for religious rituals, was reported missing after the woman’s family failed to find it at home. However, by then, it had already been transported to a waste transfer station and later to the city’s central waste processing facility at the trenching ground.
Talking to PTI, Chief Sanitary Inspector Vijay Yadav said that the task initially appeared almost impossible because hundreds of tonnes of waste from across the city are taken to the processing centre every day.
“It was like finding a needle in a haystack,” he said.
Yadav said workers at the facility, where plastic, metal, wires, thermocol, footwear and other materials are segregated, were alerted and asked to look for the urn.
Unaware that the urn was made of silver, workers had sorted it into a heap of metal scrap weighing several tonnes, he said.
After the family provided a photograph of the urn, municipal employees began a systematic search.
“After two days of searching, we found an urn matching the photograph, with the family’s name engraved on it,” Yadav said, adding that the family was overjoyed on being informed about its recovery.
He said the urn might never have been recovered had the family delayed reporting about it, as metal scrap is compressed by machines after segregation, making it virtually impossible to identify individual items.
The woman, who accidentally discarded the urn, is currently on a pilgrimage, and the recovered urn has been kept with local councillor Prashant Badwe for now.
Badwe said the silver urn weighs around two kg and is worth nearly Rs 5 lakh at current market prices.
Locals felicitated civic workers for their honesty and efforts in recovering the valuable heirloom. PTI HWP LAL ARU
This report is auto-generated from PTI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.