A video published online this week depicting a bin on one of the main streets of the Daghestani town of Kizlyar has gone viral. There is an acute problem with rubbish in the republic.

The video shows the pavement next to a bus station covered in rubbish, which is blowing in the wind, while people walk by without paying attention to it.

A spokesperson for the Kizlyar city administration told OC Media that the city services ‘do their job’, but that it is difficult to ‘re-educate’ local residents.

‘Streets are regularly cleaned. We don’t have any problems with this. Sometimes the city services do not manage to remove rubbish in a timely manner when locals leave rubbish on the pavements instead of taking it to special containers’, Selminaz Salikhova, head of the city’s press service told us.

‘Our people are very peculiar, it is extremely difficult to re-educate adults, even for law enforcement bodies, because you cannot put tough sanctions on them. They are ready to be get off with easy penalties and continue to litter’, Salikhova said.

The majority of cities and towns in Daghestan face problems with the timely removal of rubbish and sanitation.

On 12 March, locals from Kaspiysk cleaned the city beach. Activists took away dozens of bags of rubbish.

On 28 December, Dagestan’s Nature Management Department revealed sanitary violations at the October Revolution Canal in the capital Makhachkala. The administration of the city’s Kirovsky District were accused for contaminating one of the main sources of drinking water in the city.

In October 2016, about 500 locals in Makhachkala were hospitalised as result of mass poisoning. The reason for the poisoning was poor quality water from an aqueduct. The head of Daghestan, Ramazan Abdulatipov, explained that the poisoning occurred due to a damaged sewer system.

‘This [sewage] system wasn’t repaired and many managing institutions, including Vodokanal, were transferred to the relatives of its former leadership, and these people extorted money from there over the years, so there was almost no money allocated for reconstruction and repair’, Caucasian Knot quoted Abdulatipov.