Ratan Tata shared a powerful ad on Instagram.
The ad begins with a schoolboy addressing his classmates and their parents during a recitation competition. "Mera baba desh chalata hai (my father runs the country)," he says.
Seeing his audience's skepticism, the fifth-grader goes on to explain that his father is not a politician or a doctor, a cop or an army man, but without him the country would come to a stop. "Agar nahi jaayega mera baba kaam par, to ruk jaayega India ka har ghar (If my father doesn't go to work, every household in India will come to a halt)," he says, adding that his father has a job that no father would want.
The ad then shows a sanitation worker climbing down a sewer as the schoolboy explains that the desh or the country doesn't segregate wet and dry waste, which forces his father to go deep inside garbage and gutters, risking diseases.
"Sometimes I worry my father will lose to these diseases," he says.
This heart-wrenching ad, shared by Ratan Tata on Instagram, is part of Tata Trusts' initiative 'Mission Garima', which aims to "reduce manual intervention of the workers with sewage and waste".
"Mission Garima, for our brave sanitation workers," wrote Ratan Tata, Chairman of Tata Trusts, while sharing the 3-minute video on Instagram this morning.
While sharing the ad, he explained that Mumbai, a city of 23 million residents, has only 50,000 individuals are employed as sanitation workers - and they work in difficult conditions every day. "Mission Garima is working to provide safe, hygienic and humane working conditions for sanitation workers who are severely affected doing the unimaginable for the city so that we may find it clean!" he wrote.
In his post, he also used the hashtag #TwoBinsLifeWins to urge readers to segregate their biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste to reduce the burden on sanitation workers.
The ad has been viewed more than one lakh times within minutes of being shared on Instagram, where the initiative has also won praise from many.
"A heart touching message.. we all need to be a little more aware towards our responsibilities," wrote one person in the comments section. "Such a wonderful initiative, a must!" said another.
In December, the Shiv Sena had expressed concern over the death of sanitation workers in septic tanks in Mumbai, after three sanitation workers died due to suffocation after getting trapped in them.
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