Cricketing legend Sachin Tendulkar got down to work after accepting Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Swachh Bharat Challenge' and uploaded a video of his cleaning drive on a street in Mumbai on Sunday.
Tendulkar was among the nine celebrities whom Modi had nominated to be part of the Swachh Bharat campaign that he launched on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi's 145th birth anniversary, with a vision to clean India by 2019.
Tendulkar had accepted the challenge on 2 October and completed it on Sunday, also uploading a video of his work where he is seen with a group of his friends using a broom to clear garbage. The video has expectedly gone viral on Facebook, receiving more than 1 lakh 'Likes' and over 30,000 shares so far. It has been viewed more than 8 lakh times already.
In the video, Tendulkar gives a message of a Clean India, saying it is just a "beginning".
"Modi ji entrusted me with the leadership role for the Swachh Bharat campaign. When my friends heard about the initiative given to me, they all came together to extend a hand towards keeping India clean," Tendulkar is heard saying in the video that he uploaded on his Facebook page. "This is just a beginning, and it is not a work of a few days. It will take months or years, but we will all strive to achieve it," he added.
Modi had nominated several prominent individuals from different fields to take up leadership for the initiative, which he seems to have styled on the popular ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, calling each person to further nominate nine people to take up the challenge.
The others whom Modi nominated were Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, actors Kamal Haasan, Salman Khan, Priyanka Chopra, Goa Governor Mridula Sinha, Yoga guru Baba Ramdev, businessman Anil Ambani, and all the television actors of Hindi serial 'Tarak Mehta ka Ulta Chashma'.
While several of them have accepted Modi's challenge, they are yet to act on it.
