Valuable Wealth Can Be Extracted Out Of Garbage: Puri

The Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) needs to become a mass movement with the participation of every stakeholder, Housing Minister Hardeep Singh Puri has said. The minister also said that over 1,789 cities getting an open-defecation free (ODF) status was a “major achievement.

It is relevant to mention here that urban areas of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Chandigarh, Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Andaman and Nicobar and Dadra and Nagar Haveli have become open-defecation free (ODF).

The Swachh Bharat Mission had attained great momentum, which was reflected in the commitment of all 4,041 cities and towns to become ODF by December 2018, 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, it was critical to manage and realise the potential of this waste, the minister said. 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.

With inputs from Housing News