KURUKSHETRA, Haryana State, Dec 4 (IPS) – Everywhere there was the seductively deep bass sound of Indian drums as crowds of local villagers shouted ‘Jai Swachhta’ (long live cleanliness) and punched the air.
Small elevated mud pathways dividing black fields dotted with stone and mud houses facing drying mounds of grain stalks were crowded with celebrating villagers, mostly women swathed in red, orange and multiple-hued saris.
The men sporting traditional headgear, magnificent turbans in orange or white, stood ready to greet visitors to their village.
Their chants of Jai Swachhta are now a slogan in these bylanes and elevated pathways of about half of Kurushetra’s 418 villages.
It also means that these villages are now ‘open defecation free’, snazzily called ‘ODF’ in expert international circles dealing with bringing toilets to the world’s developing and under-developed nations.
Kurukshetra is well-known in Indian mythological history, its plains the scene of an epic battle fought between two feuding families in the famous ‘Mahabharata’, carvings of which are etched in places as far away as Angkor Vat, the seat of Hinduism in South-east Asia till around the 15th century.
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