The Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) needs to become a mass movement with the participation of every stakeholder, Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said today.
He was speaking at a conference organised by the CII here on PPP model for waste to energy projects.
Urban areas of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Chandigarh, Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Andaman and Nicobar, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli have achieved Open Defecation Free (ODF) status. This is a "major achievement", Puri said, noting that over 1,789 cities have been declared ODF.
The mission has attained great momentum, which is reflected in the commitment of all 4,041 cities and towns to become ODF by December 2018, much before the envisioned timeline, he said.
"The Swachh Bharat Mission, which aims to make India a clean and open defecation free nation by October 2019, needs to become a 'Jan Andolan' with participation from every stakeholder. We have taken up a multi-pronged strategy for making the mission a people's movement," he said.
With India generating nearly 62 lakh million tonnes per annum of municipal solid waste, the minister said that it was critical to manage and realise the potential of this waste.
Puri said that it was important that India looked at waste as a resource and not as garbage that should be discarded at a landfill site.
"Overflowing landfill sites are leading to air, land and water pollution in addition to loss of valuable wealth that could have been extracted from the waste," he added.
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