Mahatma Gandhi’ s contribution to India was not confined to winning freedom from colonial rule. He also left behind a powerful social and economic vision of the India that freedom ought to create: a clean India, self-reliant villages, economic dignity for the poorest, empowerment of tribal communities and a society free from intoxicants. Twelve years of the Modi era offer a fascinating story of how several of these distinctly Gandhian ideals have been translated into contemporary public policy-and, importantly, measured at population scale. The most striking example is Swachh Bharat. Gandhi considered sanitation not a peripheral concern but a civilisational imperative.

His famous formulation that cleanliness is next to godliness captured a larger belief: a free India had to be a dignified India, and dignity began with the most basic surroundings in which people lived. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Swachh Bharat Mission on 2 October 2014, rural sanitation coverage stood at just 39 per cent. By October 2019, it had reached 100 per cent, with more than 10 crore individual household toilets constructed and all villages declaring themselves Open Defecation Free. The mission has subsequently moved from toilet access to sustainability, waste management and ODF Plus villages. The significance goes beyond the numbers. Swachh Bharat converted sanitation from a government department’s responsibility into a mass behavioural movement. It made cleanliness a matter of citizenship and collective pride.

In doing so, an idea Gandhi had preached became a national habit that the state attempted to institutionalise. The same transformation is visible in Gandhi’s idea of Swadeshi and village industries. For Gandhi, khadi was never merely fabric. It represented self-reliance, productive work, dignity of lab our and the e c onomic empowerment of villages. The revival of Khadi and Village Industries under the Modi government provides unusually tangible evidence of this philosophy acquiring a modern economic life. According to provisional KVIC data, sales of Khadi and Village Industry products........

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