From Thursday, a month-long national sanitation campaign will be kicked-off on a massive scale across the country to sensitise people about cleanliness. The campaign is a part of the Government’s Mission ‘Swachh Bharat’ to be launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 2 on the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.
The movement aims to provide every family with toilets to ensure that the country is open-defecation free by 2019. As per a recent report jointly prepared by the WHO and the UNICEF, nearly 597 million people practice open defecation in India.Union Rural Development Minister Nitin Gadkari has written a letter to all the Chief Ministers to rope in all the functionaries from State level to Panchayati level in the awareness campaign to reach out to every individual household.
The focus of the campaign to be launched from September 25 — October 23, will be on awareness to keep villages clean including through street cleaning, solid and waste management, on safe sanitation and the need to build and use toilets.Making it a people’s movement, the campaign emphasises on the importance of hand washing with soap as well as safe disposal of child feces and safe handling and storage of drinking water, a senior official from the Rural Development Ministry said.
Adopting the policy of catch them young, the campaign will rope in students who will act as cleanliness ambassadors while States have also been asked to push for rallies, walks, sanitation melas, and nukkad nataks, the official said.It is envisaged that this campaign be one for all the departments of the Government as each and every Government functionary right from State to Panchayati level has to be involved in the campaign.
The official said that available fund under the NBA-IEC will be utilised for the campaign aiming to make India clean.School teachers, ASHA workers, doctors, SHGs groups, patwaris, anganwadi workers , local leaders and religious leaders will be roped in for acceptability of the programme to encourage households to build and use toilets. Voice SMS would be used in a big way apart from other publicity mediums.
Also, padyatras have been suggested across each village to identify and highlight locations of open defecations, garbage heaps and stagnant water etc. These can be mapped to create a village map and discussed in the meeting. This can be used to trigger action and demand for toilets, he noted.