NEW DELHI: If unattended mounds of garbage and littered streets with flies, rats and dogs feasting on the trash bothers you, don't get upset anymore at the inaction of the civic authorities.
Just click the picture of the garbage on your mobile and upload it on the Click2Clean page on Facebook.
Click2Clean supplements Delhi government's Swachh Delhi mobile application that works on similar lines.
Click2Clean ensures that a click from your camera or your mobile phone does the magic. The garbage will be removed without knocking at the doors of unresponsive civic body cleaners.
Launched by Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) India in October, the Click2Clean campaign has already attracted over 8,500 people to endorse it on Facebook, with many uploading the images of littered sites on facebook.com/clicktoclean.
According to CAF India Chief Executive Meenakshi Batra, there is an urgent need to clean up Indian cities as the number of people migrating from rural to urban areas continues to surge.
"This exerts an ever-increasing pressure on civic agencies to ensure cleanliness and maintain sanitation standards. Keeping this in mind, we have launched the Click2Clean campaign in Delhi NCR to start with and appeal to corporates and individuals to participate in this movement to clean our cities,Â’Â’ Batra told this correspondent.
Making India clean and garbage-free became a nationwide movement after Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in 2014. Some steps have been taken in this regard, but large parts of India, including Delhi, still remain dirty and filthy.
Delhi now has over 20 million residents, making it the second most populous city in the world. Its inhabitants generate about 10,000 tonnes of rubbish every day.
The municipal solid waste is projected to rise to 17,000-25,000 tonnes/day by 2021 and only nine percent of the collected municipal solid waste is treated through composting, the only treatment option, and rest is disposed off in uncontrolled open landfills on the city's outskirts.
It was here that CAF India stepped in.
A similar initiative was started by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in November.
Talking about the campaign launched by the Delhi government, Batra said: “The aims, objectives as well the core concept and idea of the Click2Clean Campaign resonates quite well with the Delhi government’s Swachh Delhi programme."
“There are ample opportunities where both these programs can be synergized to complement each other; the mobile app for the Delhi governments’ Swachh Delhi programme being one of them.
“Both the programs encourage citizens to click pictures of unclean sites which would then be cleaned by respective authorities in partnership with local communities,” Batra said.
CAF India, through its network of local NGOs under the Click2Clean Campaign aims to create that kind of awareness among citizens and mobilize them to participate in this campaign by sharing images on a regular basis.
“The Swachh Delhi App is being promoted by the Delhi government as a platform to share pictures, whereas the Click2Clean campaign does that through its FB page. If synced, there is a huge potential for joint action, where the images of littered sites gathered through the Click2Clean Campaign could also be taken up collectively by CAF India and Delhi government for execution.”
The NGO aims to identify and clean 100 sites within a year in Delhi NCR (Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad, Ghaziabad.)
About the response so far, Batra said: “More than 8,500 people have engaged with us on Click2Clean FB page. More than a dozen people have already sent the images of littered sites.”
She said that clean cities means litter free parks, public buildings, streets and garbage dumps, where there is a strong civic sense among citizens.
The whole idea behind launching the campaign was to raise public awareness and build civic sense in communities and also to enhance citizen participation and volunteerism through civic action.
A screening committee will short-list and select images of places which will be taken up under the campaign.
The NGO said 100 such pictures/sites will be identified and selected to be cleaned up within a year. The individuals whose pictures would be selected will be acknowledged as ‘Cleanliness Ambassadors’.
Once the site is cleaned up, the ‘Cleanliness Ambassadors’ and the local community will be asked to click a picture of the clean area and upload it again on the Facebook page labeling it as a ‘Litter-Free Zone’.
But the role of the CAF India would not end there.
Post the cleanliness drive, the partner NGO will continue to handhold and work with the community groups to sustain the program as well as coordinate with the municipal authorities, added Batra.