Clean India Movement - Objectives

Long back during my college days, I was involved in starting a movement called “Clean India Movement”. The purpose of the movement was to find solutions to the problems that our country is facing and educate people about the solutions. In a way, it’s cleaning the dirt within our country. The initial goal of the movement was to identify hundred major problems faced by India, find solutions to these problems and bring awareness among people through solutions. After lot of planning and effort, I hardly found people who want to truly support it. There were people who joined because it was fun or it was as if it’s charity. Eventually, all we did was nothing but few talks here and there with no results.

I still strongly believe that had we put sincere efforts in identify the hundred crucial problems - there was a possibility of bringing a change. Over the years, I kept thinking about the problems faced by our country and my aim was not to pinpoint the obvious loopholes but to bring out the unspoken root causes that are acting negatively towards the development of our nation. Let me give you an example on an obvious problem and the unspoken root cause of it. When we first started this movement, my friends suggested that we should bring awareness among people about “Smoking Hazards” and some of them even suggested that we should work for forcing the government to ban smoking. It did sound good then, however when I kept thinking about it, I found that there is more to it than that’s spoken. India is the world’s largest producer and exporter of tobacco. We are serving the world for manufacturing cigarettes and we get huge revenue from it. Millions of farmers get their livelihood by cultivating tobacco. Recently, I was reading an ad which said, smoking cigarettes kills more people than the causalities in terrorist attacks annually across the globe. Being the largest exporter of tobacco, effectively we are killing more people than those terrorists. So where does the problem arise? It’s definitely not with the people smoking! Now, what would you do to stop people from smoking cigarettes? No, doubt the solution includes the cultivators, the farmers, the people whose life is dependent on import/export of tobacco and the people who smoke cigarettes. I haven’t found any feasible solution yet to this problem and I know it’s going to difficult.

There are numerous such problems that we don’t probe into - we just look at them from the face of it and react. I might be wrong and you can debate with me for hours but ultimately what matters is identifying solutions and bringing awareness among people. It would require a collective effort by intellectuals, NGOs, educated people, public representatives, etc. I haven’t lost hope and I am sure some day, this movement will rise and we will collectively identify root causes of problems and resolve them. I pray to see that day to shed a tear of joy.

When something goes wrong, I see everyone around me act like everything is not working and within few days they would be back to routine. Me and my family … is that’s the end of your world? Have you ever thought about contributing something to the nation? I am not asking you for charity, I am asking you about your “Janm Kartavye”. And if your thoughts are like “it sounds good, but what can I do, our country is ruled by crooks”, well, you can do lot many things if you start thinking. Help the nation with identifying solutions to the problems we are facing and your efforts will not go waste. Identifying solutions to problems is like discovering a theory in physics, sooner or later you would notice that it will produce technology. If we succeed in identifying the problems and solutions, I am sure a time will arrive when you would notice that these solutions are being implemented.

November 28 12:11 AM

2008