Govt. aiming to make Northeast gateway to Southeast Asia: PM Modi

TIL Desk/New Delhi/Shillong/ The government aims to make the Northeast a gateway to Southeast Asia and was making huge investments for the overall development of the region, but lack of cleanliness could hamper this dream, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said.

“If such a beautiful gateway is unclean, diseased, illiterate or disbalanced, then it will fail to cross the gateway of the country’s development. There is no reason why, with all our resources, we should remain backward or poor,” the Prime Minister said.

Addressing the centenary celebrations of the prominent voluntary organisation, Bharat Sevashram Sangha, in Shillong through video conferencing, he lamented that “only Gangtok had found a place among the first 50 clean cities”, out of the 12 cities from the Northeast surveyed as part of the recent nationwide cleanliness survey.

While four Northeastern cities found a place between 100 and 200 clean cities, seven were positioned between 200 and 300, with Shillong being the 276th, he said while stressing that ‘Swachhata’ or cleanliness was a major challenge for everyone in the region.