Modi should take lessons from Gandhi to clean India

Will Narendra Modi's Clean India campaign succeed? Let's look at the basic difference between Gandhiji and Modi's theory for Clean India. Gandhiji's theory was to empower the sweepers or scavengers and provide them with skills to achieve Clean India and Modi's mission is being played in despair, despondency and aggression to divert the attention of people from core issues. Political leaders are cleaning at the same time at the same place just for photo-ops with broomsticks. Keeping a tiny part of a road clean doesn't mean the whole nation will be clean.

This mission can't be the solution to clean the whole nation. This is just a political tool and nothing else. We need to clean the politics and politicians first. The government should not mislead the aam admi (common people) in the name of great Mahatma whose foremost philosophy lay in a non-violent, peaceful co-existence of people of the country cutting across communities, and ethnicities. The mission of cleanliness, Gandhiji suggested might be used as a supplement with basic fulfillment of that phenomenon.

India is a country where 1.2 billion people of the world's poorest are living in extreme deprivation. Modi's government must know the basic amenities for the neediest people of the country. A poor man who doesn't have foods on a regular basis, how can he think of making India clean? He needs clothes, food or drink and shelter more than sweeping up the dust and leaves. Truly, India needs more toilets than temples.

For Clean India Mission, Modi's government needs to recruit at least five to six sweepers or sanitary cleaners in every institution in India. The government should be responsible for making sure all "safai karmachari" are secure in their jobs. Consequently, unemployment problem will gradually be reduced. Environmental advocates often speak out against waste-to-energy, terming it perilous, but even this is not the most central claim or argument in the Indian context.

Recent dumping grounds outside the Indian cities have inflicted grim environmental havoc and endangered the common people that live near the dumping zones. The authorities must look into the matter and take the appropriate action. Especially as recycling and other waste-disposal programmes don't exist. The dumping should be done in limits.

Just before the elections, the PM made promises to bring back black money from aboard. Modi has to do something urgently to clean India's dirty politics if he wants to give India real progress and democracy.