Village where clean living became tourist attraction

Hidden amid the greenery of Meghalaya state along the Indian border with Bangladesh lies the pristine village of Mawlynnong. The rolling hills and topaz watering holes serve as a backdrop for 500 residents, a number that swells by a couple of hundred a day during tourist season.

At a time when major Indian cities such as Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata are facing a growing waste crisis, Prime Minister Narendra Modi turned the spotlight on this pristine village as a source of inspiration, highlighting Mawlynnong as a model for the rest of the country in a radio address in 2015. “I was happy to know that in our country there is such a village in the northeast, in Meghalaya, which is passionately carrying forward the mission of cleanliness for years,” he said. “It has become the habit of the residents to maintain cleanliness.”

It is held forth as an example of what concerted efforts to clean up can yield and used to bolster the Clean India Mission campaign to sanitize the nation by 2019, which is the 150th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi (who advocated community cleanliness and sanitation in India). One of the goals of the Clean India Mission program is to in- crease the use of toilets in India. In Mawlynnong, every household has a toilet.

Today, Mawlynnong grapples with the blessing and the curse of tourism while trying to maintain the essence of the village, protecting the reason people want to visit. Laphrang Khong Thohrem, 62, and other members of the village council have come together to address the problems that the influx of visitors bring. Their solutions: Streets are swept daily by village volunteers, bamboo dustbins are placed at every street corner and trash is composted and used to nourish the village’s agriculture, in particular production of the betel nut.

“Our grandparents and their grandparents had clean habits. … Nobody dreamed that the village would become a tourist attraction,” said Thohrem, who is a member of the village council.