Pancha Parivartan: Prioritising environment protection
Celebrating its centenary, the RSS introduces 'Pancha Parivartan'—a cultural roadmap prioritizing environmental protection, civic duties, and sustainability.
Founded in Nagpur in 1925, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is celebrating its centenary today. On this occasion, it proposed Pancha Parivartan to encourage all people in the country to act as responsible citizens with a sense of patriotism, nationalism, and the development of the country.
Pancha Parivartan denotes family well-being, environmental protection, consumption of indigenous goods, social harmony, and fulfillment of civic duties. The provision of a place for environmental protection shows the RSS’s vision and sincerity towards environmental protection.
It is the firm belief of the Sangh that protecting nature and the environment has been a way of life of the people, considering the earth as Mother Earth, worshipping trees, and worshipping animals.
RSS believes that saving water from homes, reducing the use of plastic, planting saplings, saving natural resources, growing trees, personal and environmental hygiene are part of the Indian way of life.
The scorching sun, heat waves, unseasonal rains, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc. that people are currently facing are all due to the increase in global warming and the imbalance in the environment. Therefore, the Sangh believes that along with the governments, people and voluntary organisations should also participate in reducing global warming. Due to the increase in global warming, there is a possibility of premature changes in the weather and problems such as low yield of crops grown by farmers, crops not ripening properly, crops drying out, poor quality of grains etc.
On World Earth Day, the United Nations has asked all the countries of the world to reduce the current production of plastic materials by 60 per cent by 2040 and to take appropriate steps to reduce the use of plastic under the name of planet vs. plastic. The RSS, the world’s largest service and charity organization, is trying its best in this direction through its Swayamsevaks.
Similarly, the Central Government has formulated new activities such as the National Solar Mission, Green Hydrogen Mission, Electrical Vehicle Promotion, Swachh Bharat Mission, Namami Gange Program, increasing the percentage of forest cover, and planting trees to eliminate carbon emissions in the atmosphere by 2070. Similarly, to address the problems of petrol and diesel shortages faced by the country due to wars, the Centre, driven by foresight, brought in the Ethanol Blended Petroleum (EBP) scheme in 2020. Through this scheme, distilleries were given special permission to manufacture a few lakh kilolitres of ethanol in India with the aim of blending 20 per cent ethanol in petrol consumption by 2030 and increasing this to 50 per cent by 2050.
The fact that the Sangh proposed environmental protection in the Pancha Parivartan with the good intention of all the people of the country to voluntarily participate in the prevention of air, water and soil pollution shows the sincerity of the RSS towards the development of the country and the health of the people.
(The writer is from the Department of Chemistry, Sri Venkateswara University-Tirupati)
