Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow :
Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is a Clean India drive and Mission launched as a national campaign by the Indian Government in order to cover the 4041 statutory towns aiming at maintaining cleanliness of streets, roads and infrastructure of the country. Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi officially launched this mission on 2nd of October (the birth anniversay of Mahatma Gandhi) in 2014 at Rajghat, New Delhi (cremation of Bapu). While launching the mission, Prime Minister himself had cleaned the road. It is the biggest cleanliness drive ever in India when approximately 3 million government employees including students from schools and colleges took part in the cleanliness activities.
On the day of launch of the event, PM himself has nominated the names of nine people to participate in the cleanliness drive in their own areas. Schools and colleges participated in the event by organizing many cleanliness activities according to their own themes. Students across India participated in this event. PM had also requested to all those nine nominees to call another nine people separately to participate in this cleanliness drive and to continue the chain of calling nine people by each and every participating candidate of the mission until the message reached the every Indian in every corner of the country to make it a national mission. This mission aimed to join each and every Indian from all walks of life.
Earlier, many awareness programmes (such as Total Sanitation Campaign, Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, etc.) about environmental sanitation and personal cleanliness were launched by the Indian government. However, these could not be so effective to make India a clean India. The main objectives of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan are removing the trend of open defecation, changing insanitary toilets into pour flush toilets, removal of manual scavenging, proper disposal of solid and liquid wastes, bringing behavioural changes among people, enhancing awareness about sanitation, facilitating the participation of private sector towards cleanliness facilities.
There are various brand ambassadors who have been chosen by the PM to initiate and promote the abhiyan of Swachh Bharat in various fields. He had also nominated some other dignitaries from different fields including politics, film, music, entertainment industry, etc. In order to continue and make this campaign successful, Finance Ministry of India has started a programme named Swachh Bharat cess. According to this everyone has to pay 0.5% more service tax on all the services in India (50 paise per 100 rupees) which will go towards funding this cleanliness campaign.
1. What is Swachh Bharat Abhiyan?
2. When and where was the Clean India Drive launched ?
3. Why did the PM nominate nine people?
4. What is the aim of Clean India Mission?
5. Why has the PM chosen various brand ambassadors?
