Trash thrown randomly in India has one of my pet complaints about India. Folks will throw stuff here and there as if they expect it to be their right. Thank god for the sweepers in India, Otherwise India would look worse than it does now.
People would throw stuff from their cars too. There were many times when I wanted to walk upto the person and give them back their trash and say “You dropped this”. :-). I could never gather enough courage to do so.
One time when we were at a famous fort in New Delhi, one of the tourist guides spit on one of the fort walls. Me and Dimple were both dismayed at this thoughtless action. Dimple managed to catch up to the guide and gave him a piece of her mind. One other time when we were inside Murud-Janjira fort in Alibag, we saw a lake which was 25% covered with plastic bottles. Whenever you goto a vista point in India, the scenery will be good. But when you look straight down you will see trash thrown around by tourists.
The Swachh Bharat campaign by Narendra Modi is commendable. And it is important that celebrities and big names like him come out to demonstrate that Clean India is one of the priorities for the coming years. Hopefully now if we see someone throwing thrash we can point out the Swacch Bharat slogan to them and make them learn better ways.
It remains to be seen whether India can achieve the cleanliness standard that we see in other developed countries by 2019 (as planned). It will be great if we make 20% progress also in that direction. Its a dream and hopefully India can achieve it.
Here is Tendulkar working towards Swachh Bharat campaign.
This is a good start. I remember sometime back when we were going to kutch in the train.. i got some weird looks when we carried a plastic bag to throw all the garbage in…
However i hope this is jut not a photo Op for most celebrities…they do it once and then it is back to square one after couple of weeks…Someone needs to check after couple of weeks what happened to the area where Mr. Sachin Tendulkar wielded his broom…:)
I think more needs to be done for creating downstream systems..I hope they have thought out as to where will the accumulated garbage go ?? A comprehensive plan needs to be formulated to dispose of the garbage too in an eco friendly way…
It’s a great initiative. though focus should be on ppl as well as system. At Same Janjira fort where unique sweet water lake in the middle of ocean contaminated due to tourist throwing garbage in it and guide mentioning about it many times, there was no garbage can placed anywhere on the fort.. No measures to take out those water bottles from pond. I started thinking these are all fishermen, just a matter of throwing a fishing net collecting them out..