In a country known for its lack of sanitation – an issue Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has formed a national programme to address – this humble village is a model of cleanliness.
In eastern India’s Mawlynnong village, tidying up is a ritual that everyone – from tiny toddlers to toothless grannies – takes very seriously. This small, 600-odd person town in the Meghalaya region is renowned as the cleanest village in India.
And for India, that’s really saying something. Discarded bottles and crumpled food wrappers mixed with cow dung – and worse – are simply part of the topography in most of the country.
So much so that prime minister Shri Narendra Modi launched the ambitious “Clean India Mission” (Swachh Bharat Abhiyan) in October 2014 with a goal of drastically sprucing up the country’s major cities by Mahatma Gandhi’s 150 birthday in 2019.
Mawlynnong is already way ahead of the curve, though. It was declared the cleanest village in Asia in 2003 and the cleanest in India in 2005 by Discover India magazine.
More recently, Modi acknowledged Mawlynnong as the cleanest village in Meghalaya and a model for the rest of the county in a 2015 radio address.
In May 2016 he highlighted it as “Asia’s cleanest village” in a celebration of the government’s successes (including the Clean India programme).
This claim to fame stuck, and the village has become a regional legend and source of pride. Walk in, and all the typical rubbish is mysteriously, miraculously absent.
So how do you get a community to become a model of cleanliness and sanitation in a country where this has long been a problem? The answer, it seems, is to start them young.
Eleven-year-old Deity Bakordor starts her day around 6:30 am. Her chore, shared with all the village kids, is the beautification of the town.
Teasel brooms in hand, the children storm the streets, sweeping up dead leaves and garbage before school.
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