According to reports, workers of a cloth dyeing factory in Gujarat’s Surat start their day with singing the National Anthem. As a benchmark set by the 2500 workers of this mill, they assemble in a central courtyard and line up in neat rows to sing the anthem.
#Gujarat: More than 2500 workers of a dyeing mill in Surat sing National Anthem everyday before starting their day at work. Sanjay Saravge, owner of the mill, said, ‘It is a kind of discipline that everybody follows without any discrimination of religion’. (9.5.2018) pic.twitter.com/KSLsV4OG7N
— ANI (@ANI) May 9, 2018
As per Sanjay, the owner of the factory, the National Anthem was sung by the factory workers only twice a year, on 15th August and 26th January, until some workers pointed out that ‘why not make it a daily routine’. Since then it has been a routine for the workers at the factory every morning. “We have people of all religions, castes working here…there is so much harmony and sense of brotherhood among them.”
A retired police officer KC Rajput, who is in charge of the mill security, leads the National Anthem. The owner of the factory believes “this routine has helped the workers to concentrate on their work…and has increased the overall production of the mill.” After entering the factory, nobody is a Hindu, Muslim or Christian; everybody is an Indian first, says Sanjay.
Though this is a unique initiative by the workers of this particular clothing mill, they are not the only one. In a remote village in West Bengal’s Nadia district, each day at 10:50 am the young and old drop whatever they are doing and sing the National Anthem. This is the time when students of the village school sing the National Anthem at the morning assembly. As the anthem drifts in the air over the loudspeakers in the school, villagers join in. These small steps go a big way in instilling a sense of patriotism in students and people of the country.
