Food Minister Ram Vilas Paswan and officials of his ministry participate in the Swachh Bharat Mission, in New Delhi yesterday.
Reuters/New Delhi
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has ordered government officers to work on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, a national holiday, to clean ministries - including toilets - in a nationwide cleanliness drive.
Modi plans to honour Mahatama Gandhi by launching on Thursday the Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India) campaign, which aims to solve the country’s sanitation and rubbish problems within five years to mark the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s October 2 birthday.
Many Indian cities, including New Delhi and Mumbai, are overflowing with garbage, a result of rapid economic growth, overcrowding and poor urban planning, as well as civic behaviour that rarely condemns littering.
India’s shortage of toilets costs the country more than $50bn a year, mostly through premature deaths and hygiene-related diseases, according a study by the World Bank. India suffers a greater cost than other Asian countries from the inadequate collection of human excreta, the study found.
Several officials in government departments said they had been called into work on Thursday to help clean up.
“We are all buying brooms, we are going to clean up the bathrooms here,” one defence ministry official said. “This is our work now.”
The order to sweep and clean latrines echoes Gandhi’s own insistence that his disciples carry out tasks that in India are traditionally associated with people from lower castes.
