School children dressed as Mahatma Gandhi take part in a march to mark the 145th birth anniversary of the Father of the Nation in New Delhi yesterday. President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid tributes to Gandhiji and late prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri on their birth anniversaries. Mukherjee paid floral tributes at the portraits of Gandhiji and Shastri at the Kirnahar Shib Chandra High School in Birbhum, West Bengal. It was followed by the flagging-off of “children’s squads” by the president on the launch of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Modi, too, paid floral tribute to the two leaders.
IANS/New Delhi
The Clean India campaign launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is welcome but much more needs to be done, and fast, if the country has to be truly freed from dirt and squalor in five years, experts said yesterday.
While appreciating Modi’s unusual Clean India drive, the experts said that the prime minister needs to come up with new policies.
“The Swachh Baharat Abhiyan is a vision lacking initiative. Though it’s appreciable that Modi has brought the subject of cleanliness into the public domain, the initiative when analysed shows that there are a lot of shortcomings in it that makes it a beleaguered one,” Gopal Krishna, convener of Toxics Watch Alliance said.
He added that waste-management, essential to make a country clean, has continuously been ignored by the government and said that it is time for the government to frame policies that would ensure waste produced after cleanliness “does not reach the landfills to be dumped or burnt down.”
Modi yesterday symbolically wielded the broom at the Valmiki Colony - where Mahatma Gandhi once stayed - to launch the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, a nationwide campaign that seeks to change Indians’ mindset and clean up India in five years.
The prime minister also administered a cleanliness pledge near the India Gate monument which said that Indians had a responsibility of fulfilling Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of ridding the country of dirt and filth by 2019 - the year that would mark Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary.
Bharati Chaturvedi, director of Chintan, an organisation that works for waste management, said that India generates about 60mn tonnes of trash every year.
She added that a “paradigm shift” is needed if waste is to be handled in a way that protects the planet.
“We need a paradigm shift, where we rethink trash as resource efficiency rather than waste management. The era of measuring a clean city by how well it picked its waste and how safely it dumped it is over. We are in an era where every scrap is precious, and its value must be extracted,” she said.
Sulabh International founder Bindeshwar Pathak said that environmental issues cannot be tackled in a day or two and need proper implementation.
“It is observed that initiatives are followed effectively only initially, which is also the reason why cleanliness projects have never been effective. Effective implementation with proper evaluation is very necessary for the any drive to be successful,” Pathak said.
However, Rajesh Upadhyay, national convener of the Right to Sanitation campaign in India, said the amount spent by the government to implement the campaign plays an important role.
“The government should know that the biggest hurdle that initiatives undertaken to protect the environment is scarcity of funds and lack of participation by those organisations which can help bridge the gap between government polices and its implementation,” Upadhyay said.
He said that the budget allocation doesn’t just mean employing additional employees for cleaning the country, it needs “education and awareness.”
“Until people are sensitised and they become concerned about cleanliness, things can’t be improved,” he said.