Gandhi's dream of a clean nation: building on the legacy

The world is grappling with the challenge environmental degradation due to ever increasing quantities of wastes. Mahatma Gandhi was a visionary leader and fore saw this issue more than a century ago.to him sanitation was more important than independence. His views and ideas on cleanliness are relevant even today. He approached this challenge through a socio-economic perspective. Along with a clean society he envisioned a caste less society. He came to the rescue of the scavengers and tried to bring them to an equal status with upper castes. For him independence and sanitation were intertwined. Mahatma Gandhi was not just a man of words he personally made the effort to bring about the change that he desired by setting examples. This paper has focused on his views and ideas about cleanliness and sanitation and aims to highlight their relevancy in the contemporary times.