The ad begins with a schoolboy addressing his classmates and their parents during a recitation competition. "Mera baba desh chalata hai (my father runs the country)," he says.
Seeing his audience's skepticism, the fifth-grader goes on to explain that his father is not a politician or a doctor, a cop or an army man, but without him the country would come to a stop. "Agar nahi jaayega mera baba kaam par, to ruk jaayega India ka har ghar (If my father doesn't go to work, every household in India will come to a halt)," he says, adding that his father has a job that no father would want.
The ad then shows a sanitation worker climbing down a sewer as the schoolboy explains that the desh or the country doesn't segregate wet and dry waste, which forces his father to go deep inside garbage and gutters, risking diseases.
"Sometimes I worry my father will lose to these diseases," he says.
This heart-wrenching ad, shared by Ratan Tata on Instagram, is part of Tata Trusts' initiative 'Mission Garima', which aims to "reduce manual intervention of the workers with sewage and waste".
"Mission Garima, for our brave sanitation workers," wrote Ratan Tata, Chairman of Tata Trusts, while sharing the 3-minute video on Instagram this morning.
While sharing the ad, he explained that Mumbai, a city of 23 million residents, has only 50,000 individuals are employed as sanitation workers - and they work in difficult conditions every day. "Mission Garima is working to provide safe, hygienic and humane working conditions for sanitation workers who are severely affected doing the unimaginable for the city so that we may find it clean!" he wrote.