Spend 5% of your travel budget to buy local products: PM’s appeal to country
Prime Minister Narendra Modi Friday urged people of the country to spend 5 percent of their travel expenditure on the purchase of local goods, produced by residents of the areas they visit.
Addressing a gathering at Mana village in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand after praying at the Kedarnath and Badrinath temples, Modi praised local products and efforts of local self-help groups.
“Today, I have come to a border village protecting our country. From this village on the China border, I appeal to travellers across the country to take a pledge to spend at least 5 percent of their travel expenditure on purchasing local products. Just like I talk about ‘vocal for local’, I appeal for this other pledge… I cannot give orders, but I can request,” he said.
“This will give a big push to local products and will give immense satisfaction to you too,” he said.
Referring to the rejuvenation of centres of faith, he said it would help the “Ease of Living” in hilly areas and provide employment opportunities to the youth there.
“Rail, roads and ropeways bring employment with them and make life easy and empowered. These facilities enhance tourism and make transportation easy in the hilly areas. Drones are also being planned to be deployed to improve logistics in these difficult areas,” he said.
Earlier, he laid the foundation stone of development works worth more than Rs 3,400 crore including the ropeway projects in Kedarnath and Hemkund Sahib.
Modi blamed the previous governments and their “slave mentality” for “neglecting our centres of faith”. He said “such people never tire of praising centres of faith in other countries”, but “look down upon” their own country’s centres of faith.
He said India of the 21st century will rest on two major pillars: “First, pride in our heritage, and second, all possible efforts for development. Today, Uttarakhand is strengthening both these pillars.”
“In the 75th year of our Independence, I made an appeal from the Red Fort to set ourselves free from the mentality of ghulami (slavery)… This is because slave mentality has gripped us in such a way that some people find every work of development a crime. Every development is weighed on the scales of ghulami. Therefore, for a very long time, there was hatred towards the development of our centres of faith,” he said.
“We all know what happened during the construction of Somnath temple and the Ram temple… Behind this was the selfishness of previous governments. They failed to understand the power of our thousands of years old cultures. They forgot that the centres of faith are not just structures, but a life force for us… Today, the entire country takes pride in our spiritual centres, and the land of Uttarakhand is witness to this change,” he said.
Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami thanked the Prime Minister for his interest, and guidance to Uttarakhand.
Dhami recalled visiting Ayodhya in 1999 and said he was “sad” to see Lord Ram “in a tent”. “When I returned, I was sad that we used to say Ram Lalla hum aayenge, mandir wahi banayenge, but no temple was built for a long time. Today, a grand Ram temple is being constructed there under his (Modi’s) leadership. I went to Kashi last year and saw that lakhs of devotees can now visit Lord Vishwanath,” he said.
