Cleaning Toilets on Mahatma Gandhi’s Birthday
This is an interesting article. The reason Gandhi had all people clean the toilets (latrine) was to demonstrate equality, it was not about sanitation. He was making a point about the class inequality in respect of untouchables. This is the dalit class that believe there lot in life is to do the lowliest jobs. So he sought to clean the latrine himself to demonstrate that. It is interesting the Prime Minister of India is promoting cleanliness with this idea. Gandhi also promoted cleanliness and taught Indians why and how to be clean. So after all these years it is still a behaviour that needs to be taught. In Australia when I was a child I remember the Clean Up Australia Campaigns, we all need to be taught. It comes from living in a material society where we throw away many wrappings. Perhaps a deeper campaign would be to look at the waste created through products. I recall in Thailand getting food wrapped in banana skins and marvelling at the fact I could throw it on the ground. I saw sustainability in this original way of preparing food. In modern society we live in a throw away society, I feel that is a deeper issue.
I recall a fellow Australian I met in Perth told me he started up a Clean Up India campaign, he got local officials involved and the schools. It was effective over many years. So perhaps this idea can spread across the country. The PM can set a good example and that is positive, but campaigns across the country may be effective, starting with children. Perhaps include pollution in the education curriculum and question are there better ways to package goods that is sustainable?
Modi orders bureaucrats to clean toilets on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday
Official: ‘My children are upset that I will have to go to the office even on a national holiday’
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
AFP
Published — Tuesday 30 September 2014
Last update 30 September 2014 12:52 pm
NEW DELHI: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has ordered his bureaucrats to come in to work to clean up their offices — including toilets — on this week’s national holiday to celebrate Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. The move is part of a nationwide cleanliness drive to be launched by Modi on the holiday Thursday, with the premier himself expected to take a broom to the capital’s notoriously dirty streets. The initiative has sparked grumblings by officials from India’s bureaucracy who say the request to work, although theoretically voluntary, cannot be ignored. Modi has cracked down on officials since storming to power in May elections, demanding they turn up to work at 9am and paying unannounced visits to government offices. “We have already been turning up on time and working till late (since Modi took office). Now we have been asked to wield the broom and we might as well do so,” one reluctant official said in New Delhi. “My children are upset that I will have to go to the office even on a national holiday,” he said. But another official was decidedly upbeat, saying it was an important step in ridding India of its entrenched class system in which only those from low castes cleaned up waste. “It is an unprecedented sanitation movement,” the officer in the power ministry said. “Wielding the broom is a powerful symbol. It shows that no work is mean and that each one of us should be responsible for cleaning up our waste.” The drive is partly aimed at sprucing up government offices which are often littered with rubbish, stink of urine and have walls dirtied with dried spit. Advertisements in all major dailies urged residents of Delhi to “come forward in large numbers” for the programme’s launch. Sanitation was very close to the heart of independence hero Gandhi who used to clean latrines himself at a time when there were no flush toilets in the country. Modi has stressed the importance of sanitation in almost all his public speeches since his May victory, vowing to make India clean by 2019, to coincide with the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhi. Roughly half of India’s population do not have toilets in their homes and must defecate in the open, a health and safety problem that Modi has also vowed to fix.