No doubt ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan’ an effort towards ‘Swasth Bharat’ has been rated as the top most people inclusive effort launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi but the biggest challenge facing today is change in peoples’ mindset to keep public places clean and to augment the capacity of civic bodies to collect and treat the wastage. By just containing the drive for a day or a week is not going to imbibe the habit of cleanliness among people. There has to be an effective mechanism to manage and treat the waste created daily. Unless and until such an initiative is there the very purpose of the campaign will meet its premature death. Govt will allocate funds and build the needed infrastructure but bringing in behaviourial change in citizens is a tough task. Any open space is a public utility space. There is not much change in cities as far as behavioural attitudes are concerned. Cities and towns generate over 40,000 million tones of sewage per day and only a minuscule 20 per cent of the total muck gets treated and the bulk of untreated sewage is discharged into the nearest water bodies like river, lakes etc. Until there is a mechanism to treat all these untreated sewage to its last drop, complete cleanliness will remain a distant dream. It is important to be aware of the hygienic concerns that can be incorporated in the campaign which would not only increase life span but productivity also. Today the cities which boast of cleanliness were also once unmindful of filth and garbage produced as part of industrialisation but there was a concerted effort to make the city and country clean for quite some time to achieve the modern day title. The Swachh Bharat is not only external cleaning but primarily it is about hygiene though this point is not widely accepted as it should be. There is greater involvement of people than the Govt to make the campaign successful.
