PM Modi dedicated the honor to crores of Indians who made the initiative a part of their daily lives.

NEW YORK(TIP): Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been conferred the ‘Global Goalkeeper Award’ for the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan launched by the government.

The award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was presented to PM Modi by Bill Gates in New York on Wednesday, Sept 25  morning. Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, or the Clean India Mission, was one of the first few ambitious projects that PM Modi launched in his first term at the Centre in 2014.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi received the Global Goalkeeper Award at tonight’s Goalkeepers Global Goals Awards. This award recognizes the progress India has made in providing safe sanitation under his leadership.

Getting the award in the year of Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary is personally significant for me. When 130 crore people take a pledge, any challenge can be overcome,” PM Modi said in a series of tweets.

The Prime Minister said he shared the honor with his countrymen and dedicated the award to those Indians who transformed the Swachh Bharat campaign into a “people’s movement”.

“No such campaign was seen or heard about in any other country in the recent past. It might have been launched by our government, but people took control of it,” Modi said.

Stressing that the success of the campaign could not be measured in numbers, the prime minister said the poor people and the women of India were benefitted the most by it.

Due to lack of toilets, a number of girls had to drop out of schools. Our daughters want to study, but because of lack of toilets, they had to abandon their education mid-way and sit at home,” PM Modi added.

Modi said he was told that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had also reported that as rural sanitation had improved in India, it had led to a decline in heart problems among children and improvement in the Body Mass Index (BMI) among women.

Gandhiji used to say a village could only become a model when it was completely clean. Today we are heading towards making the entire country a model, the PM said.

“The campaign has not only improved the lives of crores of Indians, but it has also played a significant role in achieving the goals set by the UN,” Modi said.

The cleanliness campaign was launched by the Modi government during its first term on October 2, 2014.