Swachh Bharat Abhiyan then and now: Has India become cleaner?
Hindustan Times | ByHT Correspondent, New Delhi
Oct 01, 2015 09:10 PM IST
With one year having elapsed since Narendra Modi launched his ambitious Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, here’s a look at how some places have fared.
It has been one year since Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept a road at a New Delhi neighbourhood to launch one of India’s most ambitious civic programmes yet - the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.
Modi’s personal involvement, and his clever use of celebrities to promote his scheme, helped galvanise support for a daunting task: to make a country which accounts for 60% of the world’s open defecation clean.
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The initial few months of Swachh Bharat seemed to follow Modi’s lead, with well-publicised cleanliness campaigns complementing public cleaning drives that brought together ministers, bureaucrats and civil society with the common man.
The ground reality one year later , however, presents a very different picture, one that indicates that the movement has had a minimal impact.