NEW DELHI: Uttar Pradesh has taken lead in the ongoing ‘Swachhata Hi Seva’ (SHS) campaign launched on September 17 with an aim to identify sites which are generally neglected during routine cleanliness activities. In the first six days of the campaign, the state has transformed more than 39,000 dirty spots, referred to as Cleanliness Target Units (CTUs) with the help of authorities.
The two southern states—Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh—are also marching ahead at second and third position in this campaign. So far, more than 26, 622 CTUs have been transformed in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh has cleaned 15, 852 spots. In Bihar and Rajasthan, the authorities had cleaned 15,754 and 15,668 sites till Sunday respectively.
The SHS dashboard shows that more than 5.6 lakh sites have been identified across states and union territories (UTs) and 1.43 of them have been transformed.
At the curtain raiser event of the campaign, union housing and urban affair minister Manohar Lal stated that the government intended to transform two lakh dirty points such as drains, railway tracks, tourist places, bus stands and office complexes.
According to the portal, more than 1.5 lakh CTUs were identified in Uttar Pradesh and 1.74 crore CTU volunteers are registered.
MoHUA asked states to hold health checkups for volunteers
The ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA), nodal agency for the two-week long drive, has asked state governments and agencies to hold health checkups camps for volunteers and their family members.
More than 50,000 CTUs have been marked to take up for cleaning in Tamil Nadu until now and Andhra Pradesh has recognized about 27,000 spots. Bihar has spotted more than 69,000 locations and over 52,000 sites have been identified in Rajasthan thus far. States and UTs, where the campaign is yet to pick up pace are Ladakh, Manipur and Jammu and Kashmir (J&K).
Ladakh has picked 62 and Manipur 88 CTUs till Sunday for transformation under the SHS campaign. The number of transformed CTUs in Ladakh is 27 and in Manipur, 17 dirty spots have been cleaned. There are 130 sites marked for cleaning in J&K and 23 of them are cleaned. The dashboard indicates that 7,684 food streets have also been cleaned.
So far, authorities have organised over 42,000 cultural programmes and 7,783 ‘Waste to Art’ events part of the campaign.