New Delhi : The Clean India campaign launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is welcome but much more needs to be done, and fast, if the country has to be truly freed from dirt and squalor in five years, experts said Thursday.
While appreciating Modi’s unusual Clean India drive, the experts told IANS that the prime minister needs to come up with new policies.
“The Swachh Baharat Abhiyan is a vision lacking initiative. Though its appreciable that Modi has brought the subject of cleanliness into the public domain, the initiative when analysed shows that there are a lot of shortcomings in it that makes it a beleaguered one,” Gopal Krishna, convener, Toxics Watch Alliance, told IANS.
He added that waste-management, essential to make a country clean, has continuously been ignored by the government and said that it is the time for the government to frame policies that would ensure waste produced after cleanliness “does not reach the landfills to be dumped or burnt down”.
Modi Thursday symbolically wielded the broom at the Valmiki Colony – where Mahatma Gandhi once stayed – to launch the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, a nationwide campaign that seeks to change Indians’ mindset and clean up India in five years.
The prime minister also administered a cleanliness pledge near the India Gate monument which said that Indians had a responsibility of fulfilling Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of ridding the country of dirt and filth by 2019 – the year that would mark Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary.
Bharati Chaturvedi, director, Chintan, an organisation that works for waste management said that India generates about 60 million tonnes of trash every year.
She added that while the prime minister can only make it acceptable to touch a broom, pick up a stray plastic bag, reversing centuries of stigma around touching waste, a “paradigm shift” is needed if waste is to be handled in a way that protects the planet.
“We need a paradigm shift, where we rethink trash as resource efficiency rather than waste management. The era of measuring a clean city by how well it picked its waste and how safely it dumped it is over. We are in an era where every scrap is previous, and its value must be extracted,” she said.
Sulabh International founder Bindeshwar Pathak said that environmental issues cannot be tackled in a day or two and need proper implementation.
“It is observed that initiatives are followed effectively only initially, which is also the reason why cleanliness projects have never been effective. Effective implementation with proper evaluation is very necessary for the any drive to be successful,” Pathak told IANS.
However, Rajesh Upadhyay, national convener of the Right to Sanitation campaign in India, said the amount spent by the government to implement the campaign plays an important role.
“The government should know that the biggest hurdle that initiatives undertaken to protect the environment is scarcity of funds and lack of participation by those organisations which can help bridge the gap between government polices and its implementation,” Upadhyay told IANS.
He further said that the budget allocation doesn’t just mean employing additional employees for cleaning the country, it needs “education and awareness”.
“Until people are sensitised and they become concerned about cleanliness, things can’t be improved,” he said.