'Swachh Bharat Abhiyan addresses untouchability too'

New Delhi, April 13: Applauding Prime Minister rendra Modi’s “Swachh Bharat Abhiyan” (cleanliness campaign) Home Minister Rajth Singh on Monday said it was not just a fight against filth but a battle against untouchability as well.

“Prime Minister rendra Modi’s ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’ is not only about cleanliness but it’s a battle against untouchability too,” he said.

Untouchability has been abolished to a large extent “but there is a lot to be done to remove it completely” from the country as not all understand that all humans are equal, he added. Participating in a function here, held on the eve of Bhimrao Ambedkar’s birth anniversary, to symbolically liberate from untouchability thousands of women manual scavengers in Rajasthan and Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, Singh ate food with them.

“It’s a historic occasion and I am touched,” he said later.

“Not all are able to understand it (the fact that all humans are equal) and accept it,” Rajth Singh said, addressing the function. “India is one country which, from ancient times, believed that the entire mankind is one family,” he said, calling upon people to do away with the social evil of untouchability. Geeta, who till some years ago worked as a manual scavenger, told IANS that she was happy to be liberated from the tag of being an untouchable.

“I never thought that I would get a chance to sit and eat with such prominent people in my life and that people, in whose house I worked as a manual scavenger, would treat me as a normal human being and not somebody who was untouchable,” she said, adding that it could become a reality because of Sulabh Intertiol, an NGO spearheading the sanitation and social reform movement. (IANS)