The Abhiyan was launched by the Honorable Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 2nd of October, 2014 at Rajghat, New Delhi with an aim to make India clean. Aim was to provide sanitation facilities to every family, including toilets, solid and liquid waste disposal systems, village cleanliness, and safe and adequate drinking water supply by 2nd October, 2019. It will be a befitting tribute to the Father of the Nation on his 150th birth anniversary. It is significant that the PM himself is taking very proactive role in making the campaign a success; at Rajghat he started the campaign by cleaning the street by himself. However, it has been clearly declared that the campaign is not only the duty of the government but each and every citizen of the country is equally responsible to keep the nation clean or swachh.
To accelerate the efforts to achieve universal sanitation coverage and to put focus on sanitation, the Honorable Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, launched the Swachh Bharat Mission on 2nd October, 2014. The Mission Coordinator shall be Secretary, Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation (MDWS) with two Sub-Missions – the Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) and the Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban). The Mission aims to achieve a Swachh Bharat by 2019, as a fitting tribute to Mahatma Gandhi on his 150th birth anniversary.
The campaign of clean India movement is the biggest step taken ever as a cleanliness drive till date. On the day of the launch of campaign around 3 million government employees including students from schools and colleges had participated in the event to make it popularize globally and make common public aware about it. This event was organized at Rashtrapati Bhawan on 2nd of October in 2014 in the presence of 1500 people. This event was flagged off by the Former President, Mr. Pranab Mukherjee.
Honorable Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, had nominated the name of nine famous personalities from business industries, sports and Bollywood to drive the clean India campaign. He also had requested from all the nine personalities to invite another nine personalities individually and requested them to continue the chain of nine people and take this campaign to every Indian living in any corner of the country.
Narendra Modi also said that this campaign should be taken as a big challenge and should pass the request to invite other nine people individually (just like branching of tree) so that this vision of cleanliness may be completed till 2019 and India can become a clean country forever in the history.