Forty-six years and one day before Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off the Swachh Bharat Mission on October 2, 2014 — the 145th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi — Lee Kuan Yew had done something similar in Singapore. On October 1, 1968, a little over three years after Singapore became an independent republic, prime minister Lee launched the government’s first nationwide public education programme, dubbed The Keep Singapore Clean Campaign. The aim of the month-long mission: to make Singapore the cleanest and greenest city in the region by tackling its bane of littering in public places. A month, of course, is hardly enough for large-scale change of any kind. Not even a year. Nor a decade. To be sure, the initial success emboldened Singapore to follow up with a series of campaigns over the decades — from Use Your Hands and Keep the Toilets Clean to a Clean and Green Week in the 1990s.

In 2018, a year before the Swachh Bharat Mission hopes to eradicate open defecation — 2019 is also the year of General Election — it would be 50 years of The Keep Singapore Clean Campaign................Read more

Source: The Economic Times