Swachta Abhiyan for a cleaner India still a far-off goal
Under the stewardship of the Mahatma Gandhi, Indians may have gained freedom, but his dream of a clean India still remains unfulfilled. It seems to be far-off despite several decades having passed since India became free. Mahatma Gandhi gave so much importance to cleanliness that he once remarked, "Sanitation is more important than independence." The Government launched Swachh Bharat Mission over three years ago to mark his birth anniversary. But there is still a lot to be done to reach the consummation.
‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ is a common aphorism which suggests that being clean is the next best thing to being morally good. Apart from bringing physical, mental and spiritual health to the person observing cleanliness, it creates positivity, a sense of beauty, which motivates. Gandhi demonstrated and insisted on the individual and collective cleanliness throughout his life.
On the occasion of Gandhi Jayanti, 2014, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched a nation-wide cleanliness campaign and exhorted the State Governments to achieve the goal by 2019 as a befitting tribute to the father of the nation on his 150th birth anniversary.
The concept of ‘Swachh Bharat’ is to provide sanitation facilities to every family, including toilets, solid and liquid waste disposal systems, village cleanliness and safe and adequate drinking water supply.
Ramesh Bhateja, the brand ambassador of Municipal Corporation of Roorkee, says, “We cannot complete the mission of clean India until we have the people’s participation. The people must be persuaded through campaign to segregate the waste so that the garbage collected can be reused, recycled and thus reduced. While administering the pledge of cleanliness to the officers and staffers of the Nagar Palika, I told everyone not to let Swachhta Pakhwada-the fortnightly cleanliness drive being launched at the gram panchayat levels-be an act of tokenism, but a programme that is done from the heart.”
Spreading his message on building toilets by showing interesting clippings of collected articles on toilets ranging from the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair proposing his now wife Cherie Booth in 1976 while she was down on her knees cleaning a toilet to the Indian-origin American astronaut Sunita Williams talking about using toilets in space, Bhateja’s efforts have been recognised by Limca Book of Records as well. The 982 articles collected by him published in various newspapers and journals have made their entry in the ‘interesting’ category of LBR with dateline from 1996 to 2016.
Gandhi exemplified the idea of cleanliness during his visit to Haridwar during Kumbh Mela with the workers from the Phoenix Settlement who served as scavengers at the mega fair.
The same year he visited the Servants of India Society quarters at Poona. There he earned scorn of the members of the small colony when they saw him cleaning the latrines one morning. But Gandhi believed that work of this kind qualified one for ‘Swaraj’. Wherever and whenever he went in the country, he found unsanitary conditions in some form or the other and lamented that though few could afford shoes it was unthinkable to walk barefoot in India.
It hurt him to see the marble floor of Kashi Vishwanath Temple-set with silver coins-collecting dirt and wondered why most entrances to the fabled shrines were through narrow slippery, filthy lanes.
Sceptic over the achievement of the Clean India target set by the Centre by next year, veteran author and columnist Raj Kanwar says, “The ongoing Swachhta Pakhwada in Uttarakhand is going to be another futile campaign.
It has been three years since the Prime Minister launched ‘Swacch Bharat Abhiyaan’. However, things have not changed much. Haridwar and Dehradun cities are as dirty as the rest of the State. The campaign is being reduced to photo opportunity. Unless the Government and the district administration down to the municipal corporations and the rural bodies take some sincere initiatives in their respective spheres of work instead of craving for limelight and the people at large come forward to make and keep things clean in their houses and their vicinities the campaign is likely to peter out as another exercise in futility.
Dehradun, in particular, is becoming a city of garbage which is being found in heaps. The scene must change,” he said.
Queried over the progress of the campaign, the former city mayor Manoj Garg said, “As part of the awareness campaign, we strove to spread message of cleanliness among the students of the schools of the district.
They have been urged not to throw garbage on the streets and stop others from doing so. For garbage collection, door to door collection system is being carried out in 22 wards of the city. Very soon we would start an award system for those who send video clipping showing the people dumping garbage on the roads. The offenders would be penalised for the same subsequently.”