EMN
Dimapur, January 2
It draws allegory to the context of cleanliness being next to godliness: It is both worship and social responsibility that a local Christian worship group has in mind. Gloria Patri, a local Christian worship group, has been conducting worship sessions as well as undertaking cleanliness drives around the town.
The Gloria Patri’s event ‘The Worship Event’ is being conducted at the IMC Hall in Dimapur since January 1. The event will culminate on January 3. The program starts from 4 PM every evening.
“The worship event is an initiative of Sinai ministry, and it is being held with the participation of worship leaders of different churches and ministries who have come together with one agenda – to give glory to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,” a message from the organizers said on Saturday, January 2.
“Gloria Patri was first held in the month of April 2014, and it has since then spread different towns and even New Delhi recently, carrying God’s message through praise and worship. But the objective of Gloria patri is not only to bring spiritual transformation but also to bring social transformation.”
Also, besides with the worship time in the evenings, the Gloria Patri team took the streets in the mornings to clean up the towns, the organizers said. “With the Swachh Bharat taking up the task months later, the next vision of Gloria Patri for social transformation was to build communities. And that is where the building community project took birth.”
The organizers said that the project seeks out to “identify a poor widow every month and help them repair their homes or help them in fulfilling some of their needs with the donation and materials from well wishers.”
Swachh Bharat Abhiyan
Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is a national campaign by the Government of India, covering 4,041 statutory cities and towns, to clean the streets, roads and infrastructure of the country.
The campaign was officially launched on 2 October, 2014 at Rajghat in New Delhi. It is India’s biggest ever cleanliness drive and 3 million government employees and school and college students of India participated in this event.
India’s Rs. 62,000 crore cleanliness drive, ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’ is the largest of it’s kind, and the first big-buck social campaign to be launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Kicked off on Mahatma Gandhi’s 145th birthday, the movement has soared in popularity with star campaigners like Aamir Khan, Priyanka Chopra, Shashi Tharoor, and Sachin Tendulkar accepting and supporting the idea of a ‘Clean India.’
The mission is estimated to cost a whooping Rs. 62,000 crore and is expected to reach out to 4,000 towns over the next 5 years. The objective is to achieve a ‘Clean India’ by 2019, coinciding with the year that India will celebrate Gandhi’s 150th birthday anniversary.
Included in the ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan,’ is the government’s proposal to construct 11 crore toilets in these 5 years to end the highly unsanitary practice of open defecation in India. That translates into one new toilet being built every second!
Per a 2010 U.N. report, India accounted for 60% of the overall population of 2.5 billion people that lacked access to toilets and latrines, and other basic sanitation facilities. In numbers, that translates into roughly 130 million households.
