By Our Correspondent
NEW DELHI/BHUBANESWAR: The MoPNG Swachchta Pakhwada Awards were presented to the winners by the Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Shri Hardeep Singh Puri today. The Minister also launched the Ministry’s annual publication ‘Indian Petroleum & Natural Gas Statistics 2020-21’. This is a repository of data which gives an overall picture of India’s oil & Gas sector including exploration, production, refining, transportation and marketing, imports and exports of crude oil& petroleum products.
Congratulating the winners and the participants of the event, Shri Puri said that among all the central programs, Swachchta is more than a scheme. It not only has the physical targets, but also it is a process aimed at generating higher consciousness about cleanliness. He said that the stakeholders in the oil and gas sector have captured this philosophy in their work and their premises have become top class. The Minister also lauded the sector for its contribution in the national economy. The Minister emphasised on making more efforts to make the country Atamnirbhar in the sector. Shri Puri also stressed on generating reliable data and putting it in the public domain, so that it can be used for research and analysis.
The Swachhta Pakhwada was organised by Oil & Gas CPSEs, and attached offices of Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas during 1st-15th July last year. Motivational events were organised with full zeal and enthusiasm to encourage the Petroleum sector fraternity for their active participation and contribution towards Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and making India clean, green and healthy. In order to ensure a healthy competition and more effective outcome of the Pakhwada, “Swachhta Pakhwada Awards” have been instituted for exemplary performance during the fortnight. Base on their performance in the event, IOCL was ranked first, ONGC second and HPCL came third.
As a result of this initiative led by MoPNG, more than 2 lakh hygiene kits, around 3 lakh masks and around 1.1 lakh eco-friendly bags were distributed. Around 1.3 lakh trees were planted and more than 7 thousand dustbins installed. During the pakhwada, 40 plastic waste collection centres were set up and more than 4000 online internal & external competitions were organized which saw an active participation of around 70 thousand people.
