How ICleanIndia app is helping you participate in Narendra Modi's Swachh Bharat Mission
Friday October 24, 2014,
3 min Read
In his maiden official visit to India, Mark Zuckerberg made headlines by promising to build a mobile application to support the Prime Minister’s Swachh Bharat Initiative. The statement didn’t receive a gleeful response given the fact that recently government had also announced #MakeInIndia.
Taking the opportunity given by #MakeInIndia movement, Delhi-based startup, SocialCops has released an Android Application “ICleanIndia – Swachh Bharat Mission” to enable citizens to participate in the Swachh Bharat Movement. Simply put, the 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 & start participating in change instead. Communities & 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 & schools have been organizing their students in droves.
Vasundhara Garg from the Marketing Team at SocialCops speaks about the genesis of the idea of ICleanIndia,I wanted to organize a cleanup drive in my locality in my neighborhood – but my friends live in different localities & I didn’t know how to approach enough neighbors in my community. It was in this pain point that the idea for an app to enable citizens to organize them to create a cleaner community originated from.
The ICleanIndia mobile application will allow citizens to:
1. Post photos of unclean spots in their locality;
2. Mark the photographs on a map;
3. Organize a cleanliness drive & invite friends & neighbors to join in.
It seamlessly connects with your Facebook & Twitter accounts & allows you to share your story & photos with your friends.
Varun Banka, co-founder of SocialCops says,
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, social media & gamification, we believe that we can affect large scale behavior change.
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 process millions of discrete data points to derive insights – that enable key decision makers – the government, corporate heads, policy makers, non profits and media houses to make data driven decisions. A graduate from Nanyang Tecchnological University, Prukalpa Sankar, Co-founder, SocialCops mentions,
In the past, we’ve used citizen crowd sourced data to affect large scale decisions such as using citizen rating systems of street cleanliness for public worker incentive programs.
SocialCops has recently raised a round of funding from Rajan Anandan, Managing Director of Google India & Manoj Menon, Managing Director of Frost & Sullivan, APAC.
Android users can download the ICleanIndia App here.