The clean India campaign was announced by the 15th Prime Minister of India on 15th August 2014 and was started on 2nd October 2014, as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi. The mission got started by the PM of India himself. He took up the broom and started cleaning the streets. It was not just because his intension was to clean up that area but was ultimately to spread the message to the entire nation to participate in the movement. Nine people were nominated namely Anil Ambani, Baba Ramdev, Kamal Hassan, Mridula Sinha, Sachin Tendulkar, Priyanka Chopra, Salman Khan, Shashi tharoor and the team of TV series ‘Tarak Mehta ka Ulta Chashma’, and these nine people were requested to invite other nine people and so on, so as to make a chain and ‘spread’ the mission in a tree like manner.

ICT is present everywhere, be it India or any other part of the world. ICT which stands for ‘Information and communication technology’ finds its application in each and every field such as Education, Banking and Finance, Hospitality, eCommerce, eGovernance, Agriculture, Defence, Manufacturing and many more to go. Today we cannot imagine our world without ICT.

Now let’s take a look on the role of ICT on the clean India campaign. The same day, i.e., the day when the clean India campaign was started, many of us took a pledge on many social networking sites, a part of ICT, saying, ‘I take the pledge to give 100 hours every year towards cleaning i.e. 2 hours per week’, ‘I’m in, in the movement, ‘I take the pledge to stop littering’ and many more. But my question is that ‘will it really help?’, ‘will it help by announcing in the friend circle that I would not make my India dirty?’ Yes it will. It has two reasons. One, it would make one ashamed the next time he would think of littering. Second, it would motivate one’s friends to do the same, to make our motherland clean. But on a different tangent I would say that ‘Actions speak louder than words’. So it would be better to put the household garbage into a nearby dustbin. But wait! Where is the dustbin? This is where the problem arises and where the Municipal Corporation needs to work. The first and foremost thing that must be done is to make the dustbins available on the streets in plenty of numbers. The door to door garbage collection service should be practiced in every city like it is done in metro cities. And along with this there should be helpline numbers on which common people can register their complaints. Clean India does not ends over here only. The next step is the waste management. This problem arises in the urban areas only. In the rural areas, people use to dig the land and put waste into it and cover it so that it degrades over time.

For proper waste management, the work needs to be done from the ground level. We should start by placing the degradable and non-degradable waste in separate bags, i.e. bags of different colours should be used. Now, everyone does not know the difference between degradable and non-degradable waste. Here comes the key role of ICT. Today everyone has a mobile. Government should make some apps which gives information about the degradable and non-degradable products or which can take the photo of a product and identify whether it’s degradable or non-degradable. Next, door to door garbage collection should be done. Moreover as mentioned in the preceding paragraph, dustbins should be present on every street. Volunteers should be selected from common people to work along with the police department and Municipal Corporation. The volunteers should be made responsible for the cleanliness of a particular area. These volunteers and officers should always be connected in a network. Every area must be under CCTV coverage which should be seen by some higher authority. The volunteers should be given monetary benefits against this and should be imposed with fine if their area is found dirty. This will improve in maintaining the cleanliness on the roads.

Next, we should understand and realise the meaning of 3R-Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. As a responsible citizen everyone should emphasise on reducing the use of non-biodegradable resources, like polybags, plastic bottles and so on and we should try to reuse them. Moreover the companies should be compelled to recycle a fixed amount of plastic material every year, and they can be forced to do so by the government.

The next problem which arises in the clean India campaign is the people urinating on buildings, historical monuments, etc. Hence, these monuments should be supervised by using CCTV cameras and its display should be to the nearest police station. So that whenever a person is suspected he can be caught easily. The on duty police of that area can be informed over phone call about such incident. I strongly support on taking strict action against this, like penalise such people or to put them into jail for a day or two, but, first there should be availability of public toilets! Yes, we definitely lack public toilets. Not just in everyday life but even if one goes to a religious place like the Ghats of Sangam and Ganges, where people go every year in magh to take a holy dip in The Ganges. The situation is just miserable. The lack of toilets and the non-working of the officers makes the area extremely dirty. The condition becomes worst during the Kumbh-mela, when crores of people go to these cities. If we work on such conditions and make such places clean, it would attract more numbers of foreigners which would benefit the economy of our country. Here also ICT can play a big role. The government can collect the data on availability of toilets in such places and then plan the work accordingly. It can help the government to decide the priority and the condition and the amount of work to be done in particular area. The problem of sanitation and availability of toilets mainly occurs in rural areas where even today around 2-3rd homes do not have toilets at their home in every village. The census of 2011 indicates that only 32.70% rural household have access to toilets. The lack of toilets forces people to do open defaecation which is both unsafe and unhygienic. The rural people actually do not understand the need of toilets in home as a result of which they do not make one. My suggestion to government would be to collect information of various villages in India ad find out the ones which have least numbers of toilets. And then to make few number of public toilets in those village and collect the human waste from these toilets to generate biogas. This bio gas can then be used to generate electricity, and even used as a fuel. To access these toilets people should be charged as minimum as possible because otherwise nobody will use it. This would solve two problems simultaneously: lack of toilets and electricity. The following diagram depicts the plan:

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Similarly animal waste products can be used to produce biogas and then using this biogas for generating electricity and heat, instead of making usual cow dungs out and using them for the purpose of burning and making food. These plants can be set up by the government only. When such plants would be established in villages, the rural people will also get a source of employment.

In order to clean our India, we need to take a balanced care of our country. We cannot give importance to just metro cities. We need to work in every section of the society. The cities like Varanasi, Haridwar, Allahabad, Agra, Mathura are the major attraction for the foreigners and we need to clean these cities. As these people are our guests and they carry an impression of our country with them when they go back.

In India around 56,000-60,000 tons of waste is generated in one day. The proper management of this huge amount of waste is extremely important. This is not a one day work to be done and cannot be done with just few people. It need all of us to participate in this mission to clean India. The children, who are called as the father of the nation, they need to be motivated, and this is being done by making them to take pledge to clean India on 2nd October 2014. Every single individual should equally participate in the clean India campaign. We should give emphasis to keep our surrounding clean just as we keep our homes and offices clean. The people need to understand the need of cleanliness. This can be greatly achieved by campaigning, organising rallies, making and distributing posters, etc. At the school level, debates, poster making, painting, nukkad natak and other such activities on cleanliness should be regulated every month. Marching rallies should be conducted by the students to spread the message of the need of cleanliness to the society. There should be posts on social media about the condition of our environment. People should keep sharing their thoughts over networking sites. These activities would definitely help to change the mentality of the common people, which is the uttermost important thing.

There is a famous proverb called, ‘Charity begins at home’. I would like to give a twist to this proverb by saying that charity begins at home but extends to the society. Nobody wants to see his or her home dirty. We clean our homes almost every day, but what about the environment we live in? Who is responsible to clean it? The answer is ‘WE’. It’s our own responsibility to take care of our environment. Even according to Hindus, once in a year, every Diwali, we clean our homes so that not a single dirt can be seen. Is our environment not our own home? Of course it is. Likewise we should clean it as well. In India, most of the people prefer a government job over private job. Many a times, even people working in a corporate world often switch over to government job. Wait! Why am I dragging private vs government in the essay on Clean India? I am doing so to point out the differences in the cleanliness practices in these two kinds of offices. Whenever we visit a government office we always see the spitting of pan on the walls, garbage lying around everywhere, but no such things can be seen in a corporate office. Why? What is the reason behind it? Are the people working in corporate office come from a different planet? Of course not. It’s just the matter of mentality, care and peer-pressure. Yes it is true that our government employees took a pledge on 2nd October 2014 to keep their offices clean but there is lot more to do. In order to maintain cleanliness in the government offices as well, we can do regular surprise inspection, the same way as auditing is done in corporate offices. One way to achieve clean offices is to assign responsibility on individuals amongst the workers only on a rotating basis. For example, 2-3 people every week should be assigned the responsibility to keep the office clean and the condition of office should be cross-checked and their performance should reflect in their salary. They should be given incentives on good management and their salaries should be deducted on bad performance. Moreover CCTV cameras can be installed in every such offices and the culprit should be penalised.

Incentives can definitely play a good role. It is a positive motivator. It motivates workers to do a better performance. So, if it is such a key player then why only limit it to bigger offices why not to small workers like our safai karmies as a result of their good performance. Their work should be checked on a regular basis by the municipal corporation. One more thing to mention about these workers is that the waste products are collected and burnt by them irrespective of what kind of waste material is present. This leads to pollution in the environment. Strict action should be taken against it. The vision of clean India can be accomplished by 2019 only if we understand the effort of every single individual. We should know the importance of little things we do in our day to day lives. As there is a phrase called, ‘Drop after drop is needed to make up the sea’. Little things like reducing the use of paper should be done. It should be made compulsory to write on both sides of every paper, which is not a very likely practice in our education system. In engineering colleges, our teachers often scold us on doing such things when we submit our assignment. To submit the assignment and files for the practical we are required to buy plastic file folder, and these folders are submitted in the end of the semester. In the next semester we are again required to buy folders for submission. And what are these folders doing in our labs? Nothing. My suggestion is to either return these files to students for reuse or to use files made of cardboards. Better would be to should switch over to softcopies. We should be allowed to do most of our work on our PCs and laptops and try to reduce the use of paper work. This will reduce both the use of paper as well as pen. Instead of buying a new pen every time one should buy a refill and reuse the pen. Definitely these are little things, but will definitely make the situation better.

At an individual level one can take pledge of giving up certain things for one day. For example one can give up use of plastic material for one whole day. One more suggestion is to minimise the use of straws that we use to drink soft drinks. We can definitely pour the liquid into a glass and drink it but we do not. If we practice such things it would minimise the waste, especially in beaches.

We know that plastic materials are the biggest contributor to the garbage. It is often heard that there is ban on using plastic bags. Often we see police doing challans on local shopkeepers for using polythene bags. But the surprising thing is that from where do these shopkeepers get these polythene bags? They must be getting it from the market. Then if there is ban on using polybags then why there is no such ban on manufacturing of these polythene? The government should take strict action against the manufacturing agencies that produce the polythene bags. This would reduce the amount of waste to a large extent. The government should make a channel of communication using the ICT through which the common public can directly interact with the higher authorities and can register complaints against such act. Apps can be made available like it is already launched using which anyone can capture the picture of a dirty place and upload and locate it using the GPS systems. We need to do development like that. And most importantly there should be proper response against such complains.

Things are changing. And it is changing in a positive direction. Today the youth of the nation is concerned about such problems of the nation. On a concluding note I would say that the dream of a clean India is not a one day task but it will be achieved by the continuous working of each individual. Every single body needs to contribute. We need to do our bit of contribution irrespective of the social and financial condition of us. And by 2019 we will definitely see a Clean India.

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