How clean is my country?

Why we should applaud Modi’s call to wield the broom

Today is a day when you and I, will be compelled to spare a thought for the broom. After all, today is a day, when India heads towards achieving the impossible, on a journey towards change. And to bring that we all will have to do only one thing. Just pick up the broom! But are we ready to do that? Probably not! But maybe it is a day for us to change.

Today when we will see the Prime Minister, his ministers, the bureaucrats wield the broom and start their drive towards a cleaner India, we will mock at them. Jeer at them. Label it as yet another PR stunt, trying very hard to hog and stay in the limelight. After all, this is what we have been doing. We have been enjoying laughs when we saw our neta’s from Smriti Irani, Ravi Shankar Prasad, to Uma Bharati and Rajnath Singh, wielding a broom and sweeping their premises. So why would tomorrow be any different. When the PM himself, after a five days exhilarating visit to the USA, where he was touted as the Rockstar, will wield the broom? This will keep the social media abuzz, making a lot of good and bad noise with Modi trolls taking jibes and barbs at him.

After all, picking up a broom is not in our temperament. For Indians, picking up broom and cleaning our mess is a job fit for others. We consider it beneath our dignity to do so. It’s a menial job, fit for a sweeper. This is probably because Indians lack the general sense of what cleanliness and hygiene means. We are so accustomed to living in dirt, okay with public urination, public defecation, spitting, dirt, garbage, filth, corruption, that thinking about a life minus all this is just not possible!

It’s a travesty that a nation vying for a permanent seat at the UN, nurturing a dream of becoming a superpower, loves to live in dirt. And this is why visitors from abroad look down on Indians as filthy and dirty. We are not aware of what it’s like to live in clean and fresh surroundings. We have grown up with this surrounding, so much so that it has somehow been inbuilt in our tradition, character and nature or maybe it’s just in our DNA. And probably that’s why, not once in Independent India have we called upon ourselves to make our India clean.

We, the people and the government, have never made it a mission to sweep away the dirt and mess. But somehow when we visit foreign countries, we maintain our p’s and q’s when it comes to cleanliness. Unlike at home, we will respect the foreign surrounding and make a conscious effort to find a dustbin to throw the crisps packets and our coffee cups. But at home, such is our character that we will throw and littler anywhere and everywhere. Somehow it gives us some deep satisfaction in doing so.

It has become so habitual of us to disregard basic civic sense, that after 67 years of independence, when the PM is trying to call its ministers and bureaucrats to wield broom, we are mocking them and being skeptical about it. But there is a justification to that scepticism.

But the country’s most powerful man and his government, who came to power with sweeping majority, will literally be seen sweeping for a clean India. What a significant photo op it will provide. The world will wake up to see India finally awakened to the concept of cleanliness.

Prime Minister Modi and his sarkar have taken upon themselves to implant the seeds of cleanliness. Will the effort be fruitful? After all old habits die hard.

To make India clean and garbage free is a daunting task. It’s going to be far more challenging than the Mars mission. But today is a day of noble clean start. We should applaud Modi’s call to wield the broom, to make the Ganga clean and to even flush the system clean!

So think before you go about mocking him. Also don’t be skeptical, or be sarcastic. After all, the joke is on us. It took the Prime Minister, the most powerful man of the country, to take upon himself personally to inspire us to work for cleanliness. If he is not ashamed to pick up the broom, we too should not be. Even though this should have come long time back, better late than never!

This small and humble beginning may land us to a habit where we can convert our surroundings clean, fresh, and livable.

Gandhi JayantiNarendra ModiOctober 2Swachha Bharat