Let's clean India ourselves.

Today this great day marks the birthday of two great sons of the motherland. The one is the world famous and charismatic Mahatma Gandhi who preached non-violence and truth and made the whole world ponder once again on its stance of violence while the second son of the motherland who was born on this day also is former Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, the man who restored the nation’s pride by defeating Pakistan in the war of 1965. Therefore, in the whole nation this great day means a lot and now going a step further our Indian Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has launched the Swacch Bharat Mission (Clean India Campaign) in order to clean the whole nation.

The idea in itself looks very small but if we are talking about India then it is in itself a great concept which has never been mulled over. If we talk about the main problems which continue to mar India’s reputation around the world and in front of tourists around the world, the lack of civic sanitation is surely a very important issue to think about. Denizens of the nation also feel very bad about this problem. In India, the lack of sanitation amounts to a lot of problems. In rural India this problems also continues to be a huge problem for the people. Even in schools and government offices, the lack of sanitation tarnishes our work and therefore most of our problems owe to this great impending disaster which has never been discussed by our former governments.

This concept of Narendra Modi must be extolled very much. Working on the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi, he has commenced making this whole thing a mass public moment because only and only if the people of the nation unify under one aim, under one common banner then only a change can be infused in the whole nation which would prove to be an extraordinary effort.

In India 53.2% people carry mobile phones in their hand, but more than half of 1.2 billion people in the nation don’t have toilets in their home. Only 46.9% of the 246.6 million households in India have toilet facilities at home while on the other hand 49.8% population of the nation have no lavatory at home and defecate in open and 3.2% people of the nation use public toilets. In states like Jharkhand, Bihar and Orissa is much worse. In Jharkhand 77% of the people have not toilets while the figure is 76.6% in Orissa and 75.8% in Bihar. Therefore open defecation in itself is a great impediment in achieving complete sanitation. This problem is not only a problem for achieving sanitation but also a huge problem which leads to many diseases in the rural villages also sometimes leading to big diseases like epidemics. To contract this problem even the Prime Minister of India had to say that rather than making a temple make a toilet. This statement sounds pretty much reasonable to me too. Problems of open defecation in itself poses great threat to the whole nation. On one side when we are landing on the Mars with cutting edge technology in our hand, on the other side we have never ever focused on such a great issue which poses threat to all the citizens around the nation.

This problem is not only rife in rural India but also in urban cities. Even in cities like Delhi you could see dirty lanes with no sewer management or waste management facilities and the procrastination by the officials and their reluctance to take any step add up to exacerbate the woes of the people. Parking is also a major issue in the metropolitan states. People park their vehicles in the lanes making the passage of the lane narrower thereby raising many problems for the people around the cities. All these problems sum up to make the life of people worse.

In the year 2019, we would observe the 150^th birthday anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi who was also a renowned preacher of sanitation. Mr. Gandhi loved two things more than anything one was non-violence and the other was sanitation. Let’s today take a vow to transform this whole nation and make our own country a better place to live. I wouldn’t say that this will happen in five years or even in twenty years but let’s start for better to change this whole nation. Let’s today change our mindset to produce a greater, better and a wonderfully incredible India.

JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT

JAI MA BHARTI