‘Swachhata’ campaign generates awareness about ‘waste to wealth’ concept: Dr Jitendra

STATE TIMES NEWS

NEW DELHI: “Swachhata” campaign, inspired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has generated awareness about the ‘waste to wealth’ concept. generation has been the biggest gain of the three Swachhata campaigns so far. There is now also better mass understanding about the application of innovation and technology for Recycling and Reuse of Waste materials for productive means.
This was stated by the Union, Dr. Jitendra Singh, at a press conference here on Wednesday after reviewing the progress of Week-3 of the Swachhata Special Campaign 3.0 being implemented in all Government offices of India.
Dr Jitendra Singh advocated the trinity of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Drones in order to segregate waste intelligently and for swift disposal of resultant materials.
“Now, if we can have an Artificial Intelligence driven module which can segregate the solid and liquid waste, then we have the robot which would carry this and load it on to the drone and then the drone would automatically fly and carry it to the respective destination,” he said. Underlining that every bit of garbage worth its return, Dr Jitendra said the Department of Science and Technology, Technology Development Board and CSIR recently launched the ‘Recycling on Wheels’ bus, which can generate Waste to Wealth at different spots due to its mobility.
Dr Jitendra said the Dehradun based Indian Institute of Petroleum (CSIR-IIP) has jointly developed a Repurposed Used Cooking Oil (RUCO) van that collects used cooking oil and convert it into biofuel. Dr Singh said the Government has earned a total revenue of Rs.776 crore just by disposing of scrap in the three Special Campaigns undertaken by all Government offices across the country in the last three years. A large chunk of this revenue, Rs.176 crore has been earned in the last 20 days of the Special Campaign 3.0 now underway.
“So our pace of generating revenue is also increasing. It means now we have learnt the skill of making wealth out of this…That means are we are improving on our scale, now we are looking forward to the saturation point,” he said.
Dr. Jitendra said, massive participation is being witnessed across Ministries/Departments and their field/area.He urged Ministries/Departments to adopt a saturation approach in the implementation of the Campaign to cover all outstation offices/defence establishments and PSUs in all parts of the country.
The Progress of Special Campaign 3.0 is monitored on a dedicated portal (https://scdpm.nic.in/) on a daily basis. Regular review meetings are held under the Chairmanship of Secretary, DARPG with nodal officers to review the progress of the campaign. Special Campaign 3.0 concludes on October 31st, 2023 with the beginning of the Evaluation phase in the 1st week of November.