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Prime Minister Narendra Modi (left) sweeps a street in a poor area of New Delhi yesterday as part of the national clean-up. Photo: AFP

Narendra Modi launches Clean India Campaign by sweeping street

Millions take up brooms in response to PM's campaign to sweep away reputation for filth

Agencies

Millions of Indian schoolchildren, officials and citizens yesterday took up brooms and dustpans to join a countrywide campaign to clean parks, public buildings and streets.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept a road in a poor neighbourhood in New Delhi while launching the Clean India Campaign.

Modi chose the birth anniversary of independence leader Mahatma Gandhi to launch the five-year drive to clean public spaces, aimed at changing India's image as one of the filthiest countries in the world.

The campaign kicked off with a media blitz exhorting Indians to tidy up their homes and offices. Cabinet ministers, police and industry leaders have been clearing files and clutter in their offices all week as part of the campaign.

"A clean India is the best tribute we can pay to Bapu when we celebrate his 150th birth anniversary in 2019. Mahatma Gandhi devoted his life so that India attains [home rule]. Now the time has come to devote ourselves to the [cleanliness] of our motherland," Modi said.

"I urge every one of you to devote at least one hundred hours every year, two hours every week, towards cleanliness. We can't let India remain unclean any longer. On October 2, I myself will set out with a broom and contribute to this pious task."

India's burgeoning towns and cities are littered with rubbish, the result of massive urban migration, poor civic planning and inadequate waste disposal systems. Rivers and lakes are polluted with sewage and industrial effluent.

Fewer than a third of the nation's 1.2 billion people have access to sanitation and more than 186,000 children under five die every year from diarrhoeal diseases caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation, according to the charity WaterAid.

A UN report in May said half of India's population still practised open defecation, putting them at risk of contracting cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, hepatitis A and typhoid.

The resulting diseases and deaths cause major economic losses, and a World Bank report in 2006 estimated that India was losing 6.4 per cent of GDP annually because of poor access to sanitation.

Modi's government, which swept to power in May, has made building toilets a priority and he has pledged that every household will have a toilet by 2019.

According to WaterAid research, about 16 million Indians a year gain their first access to a basic toilet.

This will need to increase to more than 100 million a year if the whole population is to have a toilet by 2019.

Many civil society organisations and companies have also joined the campaign, spreading awareness in urban slums and villages by staging street plays about rubbish disposal, handing out leaflets about washing hands and even giving out broomsticks to members of the public.

"We have been working on the issue of clean water and sanitation for years, but the government's campaign has given everyone a new boost," said Sajit Menon from Save the Children, which has been promoting awareness in 114 of the worst slums in Delhi.

"Before, we would find it hard to get funding from corporates for such an issue. Now there is much more interest to fund these programmes."

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Modi launches push for nation to clean up its act
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