Lok Sabha Speaker Urges MPs To Take Swachhata Abhiyan To Every Village To Fulfil Mahatma Gandhi’s Clean India Vision

New Delhi: “Cleanliness needs to become a way of life. Land, water and air, all need to be kept clean for a healthy future”, said Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla during a two-day long special cleanliness drive organised in the Parliament House campus on Saturday. Addressing the Members of Parliament (MPs), he said that the MPs must work towards taking the zeal of Swachh Bharat Mission to each village of the country.

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Mr. Birla said in Parliament,

Swachhata is next to Godliness. The Swachhata Abhiyan drive in the Parliament House is an endeavour to spread the message of ‘Swachhata’ envisioned by Mahatma Gandhi. The MPs are the representatives of 130 crore people of India in Parliament, the temple of democracy and have an important role to spread the awareness about cleanliness. I urge you all to take this message to each and every citizen of the country.

The Speaker himself undertook cleaning of Parliament premises and also visited different floors of the building to oversee the progress of the cleanliness drive. Lawmakers including Minister of Defence Rajnath Singh, Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri, Minister of Human Resource Development Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, Member of Parliament Manoj Tiwari, Hans Raj Hans, Hema Malini, and Minister of State For Finance Anurag Thakur among others picked up brooms and participated in the Parliament cleanliness drive.

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Sharing a glimpse of the cleanliness drive, Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said on twitter,

Swachhata began as a mission of the government, but transformed into a Jan Andolan. Today, Hon’ble LS Speaker brought this people’s movement into the Temple of Democracy by launching a two-day Swachhata Abhiyan in the Parliament House Estate.

Union Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank also took to twitter and said,

With an aim to spread the message of Mahatma Gandhi among citizens, I participated in the cleanliness drive organised in the Parliament.

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Minister of State Anurag Thakur, who also participated in the drive, tweeted,

Keeping India clean, beautiful and sustainable is an investment in the well-being and prosperity of our generation & the future. SwachhAbhiyan everyday, everywhere; this is our home.

MP from Mathura and veteran actor, Hema Malini also participated in the drive and said on twitter,

Participated in the cleanliness drive organised by the Lok Sabha Speaker.

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While the lawmakers participated in the drive to support Swachh Bharat Misison, they received mixed responses from the netizens. On one hand some social media users welcomed the collective action of MPs to spread the message of cleanliness, on the other hand, some users called the cleanliness drive ‘nothing more than a photo opportunity’.

Appreciating the efforts of the MPs, a Twitter user said,

This is really good. It will be really better if all people’s representatives ensure that similarly they will take care of their constituencies also.

Another user congratulated the Lok Sabha Speaker for organising the cleanliness campaign to inspire people to make cleanliness a way of life.

A user highlighted that the instead of cleaning the Parliament, the MPs should be cleaning the roads which are suffering more due to the problem of waste and littering. He tweeted,

Isn’t parliament premises already super clean. Such photo ops are unnecessary & looks ridiculous.

https://twitter.com/TheOutspokenInd/status/1149914012466864128

Another user tweeted,

Why inside Parliament premises?! They can get to the roads which are unclean and filled with garbage! Looks like they are playing hockey with a paper cup there!

“How come the premises of Parliament of India needs 100s of parliamentarians to clean it ? Is it kept that dirty??” said another twitter user.

One of the users flagged the lack of proper gears for sanitation workers and urged the parliamentarians to provide them with basic safety things like gloves.

Earlier, PM Modi has instructed all the MPs to carry out ‘padayatra’ (a march) to spread the message of Swachh Bharat Mission in every Lok Sabha constituency between October 2 and October 31, which mark the birth anniversaries of Mahatma Gandhi and former Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel respectively.

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The Swachh Bharat Mission was started on October 2, 2014, by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Run by the Government of India, the mission aimed to achieve an open-defecation free (ODF) India by October 2, 2019, by constructing more than 9.5 crore toilets across the country. According to the Economic Survey 2018-19, 30 States and Union Territories have been 100 per cent covered with individual household toilets and 5.6 lakh (5,64,658) villages have been declared open defecation free out of a total of 6.5 lakh (6,49,481)villages, as per 2011 Population Census. To take cleanliness mission a notch higher, the government has recently presented an advisory document in the parliament to launch ‘ODF Plus’ which is the second phase of the Swachh Bharat Mission and is aimed at controlling the menace of liquid and solid waste in rural areas. In the next phase, the government plans to emphasise on using ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ as essential elements of waste management.

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NDTV – Dettol Banega Swachh India campaign lends support to the Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM). Helmed by Campaign Ambassador Amitabh Bachchan, the campaign aims to spread awareness about hygiene and sanitation, the importance of building toilets and making India open defecation free (ODF) by October 2019, a target set by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when he launched Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in 2014. Over the years, the campaign has widened its scope to cover issues like air pollution, waste management, plastic ban, manual scavenging and menstrual hygiene. The campaign has also focused extensively on marine pollution, clean Ganga Project and rejuvenation of Yamuna, two of India’s major river bodies.