The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBM) has become an embodiment of the collective spirit of the nation, showing that with a strong and committed political leadership, public financing, partnerships and most importantly people's participation in the development process, no goal is impossible to achieve.
Background:
The history of sanitation in modern India begins with the Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi. There was no contemporary political leader or social reformer who emphasised and worked so much for sanitation as much Gandhiji did. As a social reformer, Mahatma Gandhi had led the sanitation movement from the very beginning of his public life. Even before the plague outbreak in South Africa and his experiments with toilets in Tolstoy Ashram, and frequent writings about the need to improve sanitation in colonies of Indians; he had a life-learning lesson on swachhata from Uka, a boy who used to clean child Mohandas's house at Porbandar. This lesson from the little boy who kept their house clean yet himself was considered unclean and untouchable, moved young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and transformed him into a lifelong crusader against inequality, injustice, insanitation, and untouchability.
Events from Gandhiji life:
It was natural that Gandhiji's ideals made a place in independent India's Constitution. The freedom movement has inspired the Constitution in a big way and the subject of health, sanitation and environment was no exception.
Without adequate and appropriate sanitation none of the three—raising the standards of living, improving public health and protection and improvement of the environment—are possible. |
Since then, sanitisation has remained as such a low priority programme with an inadequate budget. In the first five-year plans first due to negligible fund allocation and low political priority, rural sanitisation was never on the horizon of policymaker’s vision |
Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi on 15 August 2014 brought sanitation into the national consciousness and mainstream national discourse. He asked all Indians if they do not owe it to Mahatma Gandhi for Indian villages, cities, streets, communities, schools, temples, hospitals and all public places to become free from dirt and filth. He urged and challenged the people to commit to a target of ending open defecation forever and fulfilling Bapu's dream of a Swachh Bharat by 2 October 2019, Gandhiji's 150th birth anniversary. |
Conclusion
Related Articles
Verifying, please be patient.