Why Swacch Bharat mission can fail?

Sanitation and cleanliness are surely a society’s greatest priority. These are indeed the things that define a civilization. Even Mahatma Gandhi, father of the nation, averred that sanitation and cleanliness are even more crucial than a society’s independence and its individuals’ privacy.

Keeping all these things in mind and pondering over the current dismal standards of sanitation in the whole nation, Prime Minister of India Mr. Narendra Modi launched the “Swacch Bharat Mission” aimed at cleaning the whole nation and spreading awareness among people and stimulating others not to make their nation a filthy place. Swacch Bharat mission till now has garnered a lot of support and galvanized people into action. Many big politicians including our own Prime Minister went to various places cleaning the garbage or filth themselves; many big sports players and film stars came on street to do the same and to create awareness among the campaign.

But still the chances of the success of this campaign remain dramatically low. Though the campaign in itself has become a big name with school children, office employees etc. participating in the same but despite of this fact the program still needs to evolve a lot to fit to Indian standards.

One of the main reasons behind a probable failure of this campaign is encroachment. In today’s era, if you go to grassroot level and visit colonies or districts (even of big metropolitan areas) you could see that more than half of the area of the lane has been encroached by cars parked illegally. This leads to complete malfunction of the traffic there and the encroachment also leads to inefficaciousness in sanitation of the area, thereby making the lives of people there much more difficult.

The other thing is the reluctance of grass root level leaders to effect a change. When the campaign was started, MLAs, MPs rushed to their constituencies to make one or two arrangements in order to impress the government and the people but today, just as the popularity of the program is going down, these people are also shifting back to their previous disposition. These authorities are reluctant to make arrangements in their own area in order to institute complete cleanliness of the area.

One more thing to be noticed is the lax given by sanitation authorities to check the sanitation of the area. Workers here are much more indifferent towards filth and anything, and don’t even come on regular basis, the authorities show an attitude of complete apathy to all things, exaggerating the condition. Recently I visited a park and saw a small garbage bin. Just as I saw it, I also saw some waste dumped just adjacent to it and thought how much stupid are those people who did it, if our own PM can go and clean an area, can’t they people contribute that much; but just as I moved ahead out of the shades of trees, I noticed that the whole bin was replenished in garbage and that’s why those people had put their garbage there so that workers could easily take it out. This surely signifies two things. One that there is remarkable lax in the sanitation department and its workers and second is that people really want to change.

Some people really want to change and through these people the whole nation can be changed, we just need to put in our best efforts.

JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT

JAI MA BHARTI