Planting of over 200,000 trees, cleaning of water bodies and mountains, and a large number of activities undertaken to mark the successful celebration of Swachhta Pakhwada by the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas
Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas (MoPNG), its attached offices, and Oil & Gas CPSEs, under the administrative control of MoPNG, celebrated Swachhta Pakhwada fortnight with full zeal and enthusiasm.
Our Hon’ble Prime Minister launched the Swachh Bharat Mission on 2nd October, 2014 in his vision for a clean and green India. To accelerate efforts to implement his vision, so that it is ingrained in everyone’s DNA, Swachhata Pakhwada was started in April 2016, with the objective of bringing a fortnight of intense focus on the activities and practices of Swachhta by engaging Ministries, Departments & other Offices.
During Swachhta Pakhwada from 01st July 2019 – 15th July, 2019, Shri Dharmendra Pradhan, Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas & Steel inaugurated a renovated and greener Gate No. 4 at Shastri Bhawan, the building housing the main ministry in New Delhi. The Ministry held a special workshop on the theme “Waste segregation and Re-use of waste for creating useful things from it”. Ministry also organized essay writing and painting competition for creating swachhta awareness, the awards for which were given by Secretary(PNG).
On 16th September 2019, Minister of Petroleum & Natural Gas and Steel, Shri Dharmendra Pradhan distributed the Awards to all the winners of the Swachhta Pakhwada 2019, and also to the winners of Inter-refinery Swachhta Ranking 2018-19. To engender healthy competition, Swachhta ranking of Oil & Gas CPSEs/ attached offices was undertaken, based on their performance in Swachhta Pakhwada, rankings were finalized by a Committee. BPCL emerged as the winner; ONGC stood second and IOCL came third. Additionally, the attached office PPAC has been adjudged in the highly recommended category. In Swachhta Inter-Refinery rankings of Oil & Gas CPSEs/JVs, Mumbai Refinery of BPCL stood first, Panipat Refinery of IOCL and Bathinda Refinery of HMEL jointly stood second, and Bina Refinery of BORL came third.
A glimpse of the important initiatives/activities carried out by Ministry of P&NG, attached offices & its Oil & Gas CPSEs, focusing on the theme during Swachhta Pakhwada are as under:
- IOCL undertook cleaning of 37 water bodies across India, in locations such as Lunava Village (Rajasthan), Ramdhan Park Pond (Kolkata, West Bengal), BinduSagar Lake (Bhubaneswar, Odisha), etc, where the intensive cleaning of water bodies and their banks were undertaken. IOCL also installed a reverse plastic vending machine at Chennai.
- ONGC undertook a Clean Himalaya Campaign where they collected 20 bags of garbage from Kedarnath Dham & 253 bags of garbage from Tungnath, Chopta, Deoriatal area.
- BPCL undertook various activities where Cleaning of Ganga Ghat, Varanasi and more than 1200 Kgs of waste was removed and sent to Nagar Nigam for further processing. To promote the message of the Swachhta, BPCL distributed more than 6,00,000 LPG Cylinders with the message of ‘Let’s make the dream of clean India a reality’ in Hindi and English.
- Renowned sports persons who are part of various Oil & Gas CPSEs, were also enthusiastically engaged in spreading the message of Swachhta.
As a result of this initiative led by MoPNG, there were more than 60,000 activities undertaken across India and more than 200,000 trees were planted. Various activities were organized as a part of Pakhwada 2019 such as Cleanliness Drives (8450), Awareness Campaigns (5844), Competitions for School Students / Communities (1750) and many more activities. This year, the Swachhta Pakhwada saw an unprecedented public participation of more than 25,00,000 people.
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YB