STATE TIMES NEWS
NEW DELHI: The Centre has earned a whopping Rs 1,162 crore from disposal of scrap during its special cleanliness drives and plans are afoot to further accelerate it with the help of states, Union Minister Incharge Personnel/ DoPT, Dr Jitendra Singh said on Monday.
In an exclusive interview, the Minister said, a cleanliness campaign carried out at over 4 lakh sites resulted in weeding out of nearly 96.1 lakh files, including electronic files besides freeing up of 355.5 lakh square feet of spaces, which could house a huge mall.
“As much as Rs 1,162.49 crore has been earned through disposal of office scrap including e-waste like old computers and other electronic items. The cleanliness drive has become India’s largest campaign for institutionalising ‘swachata’,” Singh said.
Dr Jitendra Singh said, without spending any significant sum, the government has been able to earn so many crores of revenue through the cleanliness campaign, “which in my opinion is a huge success”. The revenue of Rs 1,162.49 crore was earned in the three special campaigns carried out by the central government during 2021 to 2023, he said. “We have seen tremendous improvement in the office space. There was a time when we had cluttered office spaces with huge piles of files”.
Through these campaigns, Dr Jitendra said, that typical image of the government office space is no longer a reality. The special cleanliness campaign is one big initiative out of several other initiatives being taken to improve the overall functioning of the government,” the minister said.
Singh said, the central government wants to make its cleanliness campaign a mass movement with the help of state governments.
“We are in touch with the state governments, the Minister said. Some of the state governments, including Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, have already taken noteworthy initiatives in this regard. We expect more state governments to accelerate this drive to make wealth out of waste,” he said.
The Minister said, during the special campaign 3.0 this year, a saturation approach was adopted to cover all field/public-centric offices covering around 2.5 lakh sites. IT alone helped in earning around Rs 556 crore of revenue through scrap disposal,” the minister added.