Essay on gandhiji and idea of clean india
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Mahatma Gandhi’s spectacles are being used as an emblem for Government of India’s sanitation campaign Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Even though Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangha, the ideological parent of ruling Bhartiya Janata Party, abhors Gandhi’s ideology, yet Narendra Modi has decided to use Gandhi as a symbol for his drive for cleanliness. First he knows that Gandhi is the only truly mass leader that India has produced in recent times who holds national as well as international appeal. Second he would probably not want people to remember Gandhi for his other ideas like truth, non-violence, Swadeshi or communal harmony because they are antithetical to his and his organisation’s thinking. It would be much convenient for his brand of politics if future generations of Indian were to associate Gandhi only with sanitation programme and none of this other ideals.
For Gandhi sanitation was not just picking up a broom and cleaning for photo opportunity, which is what SBA has been reduced to. When a new person would come to Gandhi’s ashrams with a desire to work with him, the first thing s(he) would be required to do was to clean a toilet. This was Gandhi’s way of testing people’s resolve and commitment to social or public cause. Gandhi would identify with community of sanitation workers and even said that in future birth he would like to be born in that community.
Under the Swachha Bharat Abhiyan Gramin 9.16 crores toilets have been constructed during the last five years which has increased the sanitation coverage from 38.7% to 98% during this period. India’s 601 districts out of 752 and 5,50,151 villages out of 6,40,867 have been declared open defecation free. The above statistics would have created a real problem for us if it were true. Firstly, we would require an equally huge number of manual scavengers to clean the soak pits in which the human excreta gets stored underground when they are filled. Secondly, the soak pit design in areas of the country like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where the water table is very high, especially in rural areas where these toilets got built, would have posed a threat of contamination of ground water.The act of Narendra Modi washing the feet of sanitation workers helped to overwhelm the basic demands of workers – a respectable income, safe working conditions, education for their children, health care for their families, an insurance against accident and solution to health hazards faced by manual scavengersMahatma Gandhi was opposed to machinery. But one machine he would not have opposed would be machine to clean sewer lines and septic tanks as it would have liberated the manual scavengers from an ignominious plight. It is a shame that we’ve machines in the modern world which can perform surgery without opening the human body but we don’t have machines which are readily available to clean the sewers and septic tanks.
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