An App To Clean Your Streets: Swachh Bharat 2019, Here We Come!

A few days ago, Mark Zuckerberg made headlines by promising to build a mobile application to support the PM’s Swachh Bharat Initiative. The statement received much flak — especially with the recent government focus on #MakeInIndia.

Delhi based startup, SocialCops however, seems to have taken the #MakeInIndiamovement to heart — and has released an Android application “ICleanIndia — Swachh Bharat Mission” to enable citizens to participate in the Swachh Bharat Movement. The Android based application provides a crowd sourcing platform where citizens can share pictures of unclean spots in their city and take the necessary action by inviting friends/co-workers for a cleanliness drive.

The PMO’s clarion call to the citizens of India couldn’t have been clearer — stop complaining and start participating in change instead. Communities and citizens around the country have been responding to the initiative in different ways — by organizing community clean up drives; government offices have been cleaning up offices and schools have been organizing their students in droves.

“I wanted to organize a clean up drive in my locality, in my neighbourhood — but my friends live in different localities & I didn’t know how to approach enough neighbours in my community” says Vasundhara Garg from the Marketing Team at SocialCops. “It was in this pain point that the idea for an app to enable citizens to organize themselves to create a cleaner community originated from.”

The ICleanIndia mobile application will allow citizens to post photos of unclean spots in their locality and mark it on a map, organize a cleanliness drive and invite friends and neighbours to join in. It seamlessly connects with your Facebook and Twitter accounts and allows you to share your story and photos with your friends.

“There is a need to de-stigmatise the act of cleaning and to encourage community participation in the cleaning exercise. The ICleanIndia mobile application is an attempt to achieve exactly that — through the effective use of technology and social media, we believe that we can affect large scale behaviour change.” Says Varun Banka, co-founder of SocialCops.

Aligned with PMO’s vision of citizens devoting 100 hours a year to clean India, the ‘I Clean India’ application will help individuals to clock their hours, compete for badges and share their work across social media platforms. SocialCops has been working with various government agencies and non-profits to build smarter cities at the intersection of technology, data and people. The local startup has won awards at the global level for their disruptive work from the United Nations, Microsoft and IBM. They recently raised a round of funding backed by investors such as Rajan Anandan, Managing Director of Google India and Manoj Menon, Managing Director of Frost and Sullivan, APAC.

SocialCops has been working on using technology, data and citizens to create long term sustainable solutions for smarter cities for the past year. “In the past, we’ve used citizen crowdsourced data to affect large scale decisions such as using citizen rating systems of street cleanliness for public worker incentive programs” says Prukalpa Sankar, Co-founder, SocialCops.

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