Swachh Bharat Abhiyan

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Hindi: स्वच्छ भारत अभियान, English: Clean India Mission and abbreviated as SBA or SBM for "Swachh Bharat Mission") is a national campaign by the Government of India, covering 4,041 statutory cities and towns, to clean the streets, roads and infrastructure of the country.

The campaign was officially launched on 2 October 2014 at Rajghat, New Delhi, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself cleaned the road. It was performed in remembrance of Mahatma Gandhi's words. It is India's biggest ever cleanliness drive and 3 million government employees and school and college students of India participated in this event. The mission was started by Prime Minister Modi, who nominated nine famous personalities for the campaign, and they took up the challenge and nominated nine more people and so on. It has been carried forward since then with people from all walks of life joining it.

Background

With effect from 1 April 1999, the Government of India restructured the Comprehensive Rural Sanitation Programme and launched the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) which was later (on 1 April 2012) renamed Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA).

Mission

Mission may refer to:

Agriculture

Government and military

Media

Places

Bharat

Bharat, Bharath, Bharata, Bharatam, Bhārat, or Bhārata may be a transliteration of either Bharata (Sanskrit: भरत, lit. "to be maintained") or Bhārata (Sanskrit: भारत, lit. "descended from Bharata") and may refer to:

India (Bhārata, Bhāratavarsha)

People and characters

Narendra Modi

Narendra Damodardas Modi (Gujarati: [nəreːnd̪rə d̪ɑːmoːd̪ərəd̪ɑːs moːd̪iː], born 17 September 1950) is the 15th and current Prime Minister of India, in office since 26 May 2014. Modi, a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014 and is the Member of Parliament (MP) from Varanasi. He led the BJP in the 2014 general election, which gave the party a majority in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Indian parliament) – a first for any party since 1984 – and was credited for 2014 BJP electoral victories in the states of Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir.

Since taking office as Prime Minister, Modi's administration has focused on reforming and modernising India's infrastructure and government, reducing bureaucracy, encouraging increased foreign direct investment, improving national standards of health and sanitation and improving foreign relations. Modi has been appreciated for starting initiatives like Swachh Bharat Mission, Make in India and Digital India. Earlier, as Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi's economic policies (credited with encouraging economic growth in Gujarat) have been praised, although his administration has also been criticised for failing to significantly improve the human development in the state and failing to prevent the 2002 Gujarat riots. A Hindu nationalist and a former member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Modi remains a controversial figure domestically and internationally, despite his progressivism. Known for his tech savvy image, he is the second most followed politician on social media after U.S. President Barack Obama.