“A clean India is the best tribute we could pay as a country to Mahatma Gandhi on his birth anniversary.” This is the sentiment that led Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi to launch the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan on 2nd October,2014 marking the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.
The movement is aimed at making the country physically, mentally and spiritually healthy by involving the general public and encouraging them to keep their surroundings clean. The involvement of the general population of the country is one of the distinguishing features of this initiative.
Cleanliness has obvious benefits ranging from the beautification of villages, cities and the country in general to lack in spread of infectious diseases like dengue, malaria, etc. It leads to better physical and mental health.
What is Swachh Bharat Abhiyan?
Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is mainly a national cleanliness campaign established by the govt of India. This campaign is covering 4041 statutory towns in order of cleaning the roads, streets, and infrastructure of India. it’s a mass movement has run to make a Clean India by 2019. it’s a step ahead to the Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of swachh Bharat for a healthy and prosperous life. This mission was launched on 2nd of October 2014 (145th birth anniversary of Bapu) by targeting its completeness in 2019 on 150th birth anniversary of Bapu. The mission has been implemented for covering up all urban and rural areas of India under the Ministry of Urban Development and also the Ministry of Water and Sanitation accordingly.
This mission has targeted to unravel the sanitation problems also as better waste management over India by creating sanitation facilities to all the areas in. Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is one among the significant and popular missions which have taken place in India.
What does the ‘Swacch Bharat Abhiyan’ do ?
Advocating the concept of pollution-free India, Prime Minister Modi had said, “The pursuit of cleanliness is an economic activity, contributing to GDP growth, reduction in healthcare costs, and an employment source.
The various objectives of the Swachh Bharat Mission are:
- Elimination the open defecation.
- Conversion of unsanitary toilets to pour flush toilets.
- 100% collection and scientific processing/ disposal reuse/ recycle of Municipal Solid Waste.
- To bring on a behavioural change within the people regarding healthy sanitation practices.
- Generate awareness among the citizens about sanitation and its linkages with public health.
- Strengthening of urban local bodies to plan, execute and operate systems.
- To form an enabling environment considering the private sector participation in cost and
- Operation &Maintenance (O&M) costs.
- Recruitment of staunch ground staff to cause an enormous behavioural change in people and
- To promote the utilization of latrines at a micro-level.
- setting up a network of water pipelines in rural areas, ensuring a daily facility of water supply to peopleby the year 2019.
- To construct toilets separately for ladies and boys in the Indian schools.
Swachh Bharat Mission in Urban Areas
The swachh Bharat mission of urban areas aims to cover almost 1.04 crore households and providing them 2.6 lakhs of public toilets, 2.5 lakhs of community toilets along with the solid wastes management in every town. Community toilets are planned to be built inside the residential areas where availability of individual household toilets is difficult and public toilets at designated locations including bus stations, tourist places, railway stations, markets, etc. Cleanliness programme of the urban areas (around 4,401 towns) is mainly planned to be completed over five years till 2019. the overall expenses of programmes are set like Rs 7,366 crore on solid waste management, Rs 1,828 crore on public awareness, Rs 655 crore on community toilets, Rs 4,165 crore on individual household toilets, etc. Programmes which are targeted to be completed are complete removal of open defecation, converting unsanitary toilets into flush toilets, eradicating manual scavenging, bring behavioural changes among the public, and solid waste management.
Gramin Swachh Bharat Mission
Gramin swachh Bharat mission is mainly a mission implementing cleanliness programmes within rural areas. Earlier the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (also called Total Sanitation campaign, TSC) was established by the govt of India in 1999 for making rural areas clean however now it’s been restructured into the Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin). This campaign is aimed for making rural areas free from the open defecation till 2019 and for it the value has been estimated is one lakh thirty four thousand crore rupees for constructing approximately 11 crores 11 lakh toilets within the country. there’s a great plan of converting waste into bio-fertilizer and useful energy forms. This mission involves the participation of gram panchayat, panchayat Samiti and Zila Parishad. Its objectives in rural areas:
- To improve the quality of living people living in rural areas.
- Motivate people for maintaining sanitation in rural areas to complete the vision of Swachh Bharat by 2019.
- To motivate local working bodies (such as communities, Panchayati Raj Institutions, etc) for making available the specified sustainable sanitation facilities.
- Develop advance environmental sanitation systems manageable by the community especially to target solid and liquid waste management within the rural areas.
- To promote ecologically safe and sustainable sanitation within the rural areas.
Swachchhta Abhiyan has an excellent impact on Indian society. Peoples are taking an initiative to wash village, society, colony, city, railway platforms. A series of awareness, campaigns by the district administration, state govt., and central govt. made the people conscious about the hazards of sleazy. Swatch Bharat mission trying to plug loss on health matter and help to ease the burden on existing healthcare facilities which can help for boosting up our Indian economy. we can say surely that clean India campaign (swachh Bharat Abhiyan) will bring godliness everywhere the country in a few years if it’s followed by the people of India effectively. So, the cleanliness activities to warm welcome the godliness are started but don’t have to be ended if we want godliness in our lives forever.
So, we as a responsible citizen of our country should contribute to the Swachh Bharat Campaign as a healthy country and a healthy society need its citizens to be healthy and clean in every walk of life!!!!
