Helping Sanitation Soldiers Work With Safety And Self Respect Under Swacchha Bharat Mission India has undertaken a monumental task of changing the age-old habits of people, regarding personal and social hygiene and making the country clean. Since the launch of this mission, India has achieved phenomenal success in building new toilets and creating awareness about cleanliness and hygiene. However, the people who are in the forefront of this drive, the workers engaged in sanitation and drainage cleaning, work under almost inhuman conditions. The fact that one such worker dies every five days in India due to suffocation and other hazards, is something no country can be proud of. Moreover, these workers are completely careless about the safety measures that they must follow and therefore contract various diseases resulting in much lower life expectancy compared to an average Indian. The main reason for this self-defeating behavior is the total lack of self-respect and pride in their own work. These workers are a demoralized lot and think no one is concerned with them or their fate. This belief is not really unfounded, considering the total lack of efforts so far, for bringing about change in the mindset of these ‘Sanitation Soldiers’. Rotary Club of Pune South has taken this up as one of the focus areas in its Golden Jubilee year 2019-20. We teamed up with KAM Foundation, who are the domain experts in this field and conducted a pilot training program for 35 Sanitation Soldiers to bring about behavioral change in these workers so that they develop self-respect and pride in their work and most importantly understand the importance of following strict safety measures. The programme involved six days of classroom training followed by six days of field training. We also gave them a set of Personal Protective Equipment such as Cap, Goggles, Mask, Hand Gloves, Jacket and Gum Boats. A person in uniform generally gets attention, recognition, and respect. The workers who attended this program discovered this fact and probably for the first time in their life, felt good about themselves and their work. Pune Municipal Corporation wholeheartedly supported this activity and actively encouraged their employees and contractor labor to participate in this program. Considering the positive feedback from the participants and the tremendous impact the program had on their self-esteem and safety habits, Rotary Club of Pune South has decided to continue this activity and extend it to 1000 sanitation soldiers during the Rotary Year 2019-20. This project involving an outlay of Rs. 20 lacs is being funded by Andreas STIHL Pvt. Ltd., a German multinational company that have supported this project under CSR. Training for the first ten batches of 50 workers each was completed in the first phase and their certificates and safety kits were handed over to them in a program attended by Rtn. Abhijit Joag, President Rotary Club of Pune South, Mr. Parind Prabhudesai, Managing Director STIHL India, senior officers of Pune Municipal Corporation and Rotarians and Anns of Rotary Club of Pune South. The participants expressed a feeling of being overwhelmed with the attention they got. They said, for the first time they felt, that their work was important and was being recognized. This will be followed by Phase 2, which will cover an additional 500 workers. This activity is first of its kind in India and is already being recognized as an important step towards bringing about positive change in the lives of people at the bottom of the pyramid.