NEW DELHI: Lauding the efforts of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Swachh Bharat Mission, the Bharatiya Janata Party on Monday said he has worked towards fulfilling Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of a clean India.
Addressing a press conference for the party’s Samajik Nyay Pakhwada (social justice campaign), party spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia elaborated on the success of the open defecation free (ODF) campaign, under which over 58,000 villages and 3,300 towns have benefitted.
He said that the mission is now moving towards its next phase – ODF-Plus – under which a village ensures open defecation free practices are sustained, solid and liquid waste is managed, and the area is clean.
“The Swachh Bharat Mission will be written in golden letters in the history of the nation,” he said.
Targeting previous governments, Bhatia said that from Independence till 2014, the maximum number of toilets and public sanitation complexes were built under the governance of PM Modi in the last eight years. “This was possible because the mission that the Opposition mocked became a mass movement,” the BJP spokesperson added.
He noted that ₹7,192 crore has been allocated in this year’s budget for the Swachh Bharat Mission (Rural), and ₹1,41,678 crore will be spent on the Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban) from 2021-2026.
{{/usCountry}}He noted that ₹7,192 crore has been allocated in this year’s budget for the Swachh Bharat Mission (Rural), and ₹1,41,678 crore will be spent on the Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban) from 2021-2026.
{{/usCountry}}PM Modi launched the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan on the 145th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi on October 2, 2014, in order to accelerate the efforts of achieving universal sanitation across the nation.
Under the mission, villages, gram panchayats, districts, states and Union Territories declared themselves ODF, five years after the launch of the campaign, by virtue of construction of over 100 million toilets in rural India.