REPUBLIC DAY SPEECH (26/01/2021)
SMITA KALVEY
Greetings to all of you on the 72nd Republic Day. This is a day for us to celebrate and honour our nation and sovereignty. A day to remember with gratitude the enormous efforts and sacrifices of freedom fighters whose blood and sweat gave us Independence and consequentially created our Republic. Above all, this is a day to cherish our republican values.
The modern State of India comprises of the three pillars – Legislature, Executive and Judiciary, which are necessarily interlinked and interdependent. ‘We the People’ are the prime movers of the Republic. With us, the people of India, rests the real power to decide our collective future.
Our Constitution gave us rights as citizens of a free democratic nation, but also placed on us the responsibility to always adhere to the central tenets of our democracy – justice, liberty, equality and fraternity. It becomes easier for us to follow these constitutional ideals, if we keep in mind the life and values of the Father of our Nation.
Bhim Rao Ambedkar, Rajendra Prasad and several other eminent members of the assembly immersed themselves in the process of writing the Constitution. They saw the Constitution not just as a basic law for a new nation, but as a scripture for social transformation. We are fortunate to have inherited its legacy in the form of the Constitution and the Republic The spirit of the nation’s scientific community and inventors stayed undeterred even as the covid-19 pandemic continued to create havoc throughout the year. Here is a short bunch of exceptional accomplishments our scientists clinched in the field of science and technology, in the exceptional year 2020.
• India’s first hydrogen fuel car completed the trials this year.
The fuel cell technology emits only water, thus cutting down the emission of harmful greenhouse gases along with other pollutants.• A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Science and ISRO has developed a sustainable process for making bricklike structures on the moon. The process involves extracting lunar soil and using bacteria and guar beans to harden soil into brick-like structures for habitation on the moon in the future.
• A team of Indian scientists has found a distinctive signature of cosmic X-rays to identify the boundary around black holes.
• ISRO restarted its satellite launch operations on Nov 7 by putting into orbit the Earth Observation Satellite and nine other foreign satellites, using the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.
• As a country we are proud of our scientists from Bharat Biotech, who have developed our own Indian vaccine for
Covid-19.
Let us take a pledge to work together to eradicate poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, global warming, and inequality.
We must also strive to maintain the sovereignty of our nation. This sovereignty is priceless. With these humble words, I bow my head to the flag with the words “Jai-Hind, Jai Bharat.”
Thank you.
