CB BureauOn the eve of Gandhi Jayanti, Prime Minster Narendra Modi initiated Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Campaign). Touted as a non-political movement, it aims to make India ‘clean’ by 2 October 2019 – ‘clean’ here includes general cleanliness of streets, roads and infrastructure in the country as well as access for every person to sanitation facilities including toilets, solid and liquid waste-disposal systems, village cleanliness and safe and adequate drinking water supply. The prime minister has urged everyone to voluntarily spare 100 hours in a year, or two hours in a week, to clean up their dwelling, surroundings, locality, city, town or village. Earlier, during his Independence Day speech, Modi had urged corporate houses to take initiatives against open defecation and unhygienic sanitation. In response to these recent developments, some corporate houses have either initiated new projects or extended existing ones to align their corporate social responsibility with the ‘Clean India’ mandate.
TVS Motors
Srinivasan Services Trust (SST), the social arm of Sundaram-Clayton Limited and TVS Motor Company, has been focusing on sanitation and women empowerment in over 2,500 villages for the last 20 years. SST’s efforts have resulted in the construction of an estimated 91,000 individual toilets, 100 community toilets and 700 school toilets in the rural areas, primarily in Tamil Nadu. Asserting that hygiene, sanitation and women empowerment will continue to be the focus areas of SST, Venu Srinivasan, chairman of TVS Motors, claimed that ‘the role and status of women in the community in these villages has undergone a radical transformation.’
GAIL
India’s largest state-owned natural gas processing and distribution company has announced an investment of Rs 27 crore for building 1,021 bio-toilets.The first bio-toilet will be set up at Sishupalgarh Central Primary School on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar. Construction has started in four districts: Khurda (243 toilets) and Nayagarh (132) in Odisha, East Godavari (336) in Andhra Pradesh, and Jhabua (310) in Madhya Pradesh.
NALCO
National Aluminium Company (NALCO) has identified over 150 schools for providing sanitation facilities. It has also started constructing toilets at Damana Govt High School and UGUP School in Bhubaneswar.
Reliance Energy
More than 1,300 employees of Reliance Energy cleaned their offices and surroundings on 2nd October as part of the corporate initiative towards Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. In all, the employees cleaned 32 offices and the neighbouring areas at Borivali, five divisional offices in Bandra, Andheri, Dindoshi, Kandivali and Tilak Nagar, besides eight customer care centres and 18 unit offices. The company has vowed to continue the campaign in sustainable ways and explore possibilities of greater participation levels.
Not the last word: A campaign such as this must provoke a degree of self-searching. When the CEO of a company has to administer a cleanliness oath (‘I, a responsible citizen of India, commit and pledge that I will not throw any garbage/waste on road or street but dispose it only in dustbins or suitable locations provided for the same…’), there must be something that we missed out on while doing all the growing up”going to school”learning from our environment thing.