PM urges citizens to spend at least 5% of travel expenses on local products

Prime Minister laid the foundation stone of projects worth more than ₹3,400 crore in Uttarakhand

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday urged countrymen to spend 5% of their travel expenditure on buying local goods produced by natives of the respective places they visit. 

“I can’t order people but I can request all of you to at least spend 5% of your total travel expenses — be it a spiritual or a leisure trip — in buying local products from the people where ever you travel. This will help increase the income of the local manifolds,” said PM Modi, who also lauded the local vendors in Mana for using digital platforms for financial transactions, giving a boost to the digital India mission.

The PM was speaking at a rally after laying the foundation stone of road and ropeway projects worth over ₹3,400 crore in the last village of Uttarakhand, Mana (next to Bardinath temple).

Recalling his appeal to the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort to break free from the colonial mindset, the Prime Minister said that the need to make this appeal after 75 years of independence underlined the mentality of slavery that has shackled the nation profoundly, so much so that some people in the country considered the work of development in here “as a crime”.

“The progress made in the development of the country is weighed upon a beam scale of slavery,” the PM said, adding that for a long time, the places of worship in the country have been looked down upon. It is the colonial mindset of people that has led to the dilapidation of age-old temples, he added.

The PM said that everyone remembers what happened during the construction of the Somnath temple and Ram temple. “The dilapidated condition of these shrines was a clear sign of the slavery mentality,” he said.

Mr. Modi pointed out that even the paths that led to the shrines in Uttarakhand were in an extremely poor state. “The spiritual centres of India remained neglected for decades. And it was due to the selfishness of the previous governments,” he charged.