Question

gandhiji role in cleanliness essay

Answer 1

Responsibility of People towards Cleanliness to protect the Environment:

Gandhiji said, “So long as you do not take the broom and the bucket in your hands, you cannot make your towns and cities clean."When he inspected a model school, he told the teachers: “You will make your institution ideal, if besides giving the students literary education, you have made cooks and sweepers of them."To the students his advice was, "If you become your own scavengers, you will make your surroundings clean. It needs no less courage to become an expert scavenger than to win a Victoria Cross." The villagers near his ashram refused to cover excreta with earth. They said: "Surely this is bhangi's work. It is sinful to look at faces, more so to throw earth on them". Gandhi personally supervised the scavenging work in villages. To set an example, he for some months, himself used to go to the villages with a bucket and a broom. Friends and guests went with him. They brought bucketfuls of dirt and stool and buried them in pits.All scavenging work in his ashram was done by the inmates. Gandhi guided them. People of different races, religions and colours lived there.No dirt could be found anywhere on the ashram ground. All rubbish was buried inpits peelings of vegetables and left-over food was dumped in a separate manurepit. The night-soil, too, was buried and later used as manure. Waste water wasused for gardening. The farm was free from flies and stink though there was no puckka drainage system.Gandhi and his co-workers undertook sweeper's work by turns. He introduced bucket-latrines and bicameral trench latrines. Gandhi showed this new innovation to all visitors with pride; rich and poor, leaders and workers, Indians and foreigners all had to use these latrines. This experiment slowly removed a version for scavenging from the minds of orthodox co-workers and women inmates of the ashram.The sight of a bhangi carrying a night-soil basket on his/her head made him sick. He explained how with the use of proper instruments, cleaning could be done neatly. Scavenging is a fine art and he did it without becoming filthy himself.He wrote, "Village tanks are promiscuously used for bathing, washing clothes and drinking and cooking purposes. Many village tanks are also used by cattle. Buffaloes are often seenwallowing in them. The wonder is that, in spite of this sinful misuse of village tanks, villages have not been destroyed by epidemics. Medical evidence shows that lack of pure water supply in villages is responsible for many of the diseases suffered by the villagers." (Hairjan, 8 February, 1935)