It starts in silence, with a broom, a bucket, a sapling. No banners, no speeches, no headlines. Just ordinary people quietly fixing what they see broken.
In Bengaluru, an anonymous group has spent 15 years repainting defaced walls and cleaning neglected corners under the name The Ugly Indian (TUI). In Gurugram, a group of women transformed a mined wasteland into a thriving forest, now home to birds and several native plants. And in Lucknow, a former radio jockey began cleaning a dying river, not for applause, but for conscience. These are the new city builders, citizens who are neither activists nor officials, but participants in an unplanned movement to reclaim India’s civic life.
Fixing ugly spots
“We are not an organisation and have no leader, by design,” says a coordinator from The Ugly Indian (TUI), the anonymous volunteer collective that started in Bengaluru in 2010. “The focus is on the process, not the output, because that’s where real change happens.”
Over 15 years, TUI has quietly redefined India’s civic imagination. Their motto, Kaam chalu, mooh bandh (“Stop talking, start working”), sums up their philosophy. The group’s volunteers, drawn from all professions, identify an “ugly spot”: a trash heap, a wall used for spitting or urination, a broken footpath. And then they fix it. No meetings, no permissions, no fundraising. Just work. “We post before-and-after photos and reels, not selfies,” the coordinator says. “It’s not about who cleaned, it’s about what changed.”
Their methods are rooted in behavioural psychology, not activism. “People often say Indians don’t care about cleanliness, that’s false,” says the coordinator. “The same person who spits outside a metro station won’t spit inside it. The behaviour changes when the environment changes.”
TUI studied this difference scientifically. “The man urinating in public isn’t immoral,” they explain. “He’s reacting to cues of neglect. Building more toilets won’t fix, restoring dignity to the space will.”
Their early work, redesigning walls, clearing garbage, and installing bins, became the foundation of what they call “spot fixes.” In one instance, they simply sloped a public wall so that urine would splash back on the offender’s feet. “He stopped immediately,” the coordinator recalls. “That’s design as deterrence.” The team’s approach caught the attention of Cornell University, which later cited their work as an example of cultural behavioural design.
TUI also found creative ways to motivate the city’s cleaning staff. “We noticed some women sweepers cleaned the same filthy spot daily,” the coordinator says. “So we introduced rangoli drawn on footpaths… it’s drawn only on a clean floor. Once they washed and decorated the area, dumping stopped. They took ownership.”
It wasn’t just a morale boost; it became a social experiment in civic psychology. “We even ran a citywide rangoli competition,” the coordinator adds. “Cornell called it a clever cultural practice.”
Their biggest achievement remains Project UFO (Under the Flyover), a series of underpasses in Bengaluru once dark with filth and now painted with bold geometric murals. “Initially, government officials were wary,” the coordinator says. “But once they joined the clean-ups, that changed. We’ve had four-term MLAs, IAS officers, and kids working side by side. Cleaning together reveals a shared humanity.”
For TUI, cleanliness is not a virtue but a form of citizenship. “Abroad, people fix their plumbing, paint their homes. Here, we hire help to clean our bathrooms. That’s a mindset problem,” says the coordinator, calling the group’s ethos “positive anarchy”. “For corporations, we call it disruptive innovation,” he laughs. “For us, it’s civic sanity. We don’t wait for permission, we just do,” he adds.
A green transformation
In Gurugram, another citizen movement operates with similar persistence but a different palette. IAmGurgaon (IAG), founded in 2009 by a group of concerned citizens including Priti Sanwalka, Latika Thukral, Swanzal Kak Kapoor, Nidhi Kankan, Namrita Chaudhury, Anjali Khatri and Vasundhara Agarwal, has spent 15 years converting degraded land into green sanctuaries. One of its flagship projects, the Aravalli Biodiversity Park, began as a barren mining site.
“It was a dumping ground,” recalls Sanwalka. “No soil, no water, only stones. Everyone said nothing could grow there.”
Undeterred, the women partnered with the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram and the Haryana Forest Department, and enlisted rewilding expert Vijay Dhasmana. “None of us had ecology backgrounds,” Sanwalka says. “But each of us brought a skill set, design, project management, communication. We learned by doing.”
Fifteen years later, the park is a 380-acre forest hosting over 300 native plant species and 201 species of birds. It recharges an estimated 320 million litres of groundwater annually and provides an ecological refuge in the middle of the city.
“The transformation taught us patience,” says Sanwalka. “It takes years before a tree shades a path. But when citizens see the results, they realise the power of collective effort.”
Every monsoon, schools and corporates plant trees in the park. “We use CSR funds for maintenance,” she adds. “The government helps with fencing and security. Everything else, cleaning, planting, upkeep, comes from citizens.”
The initiative has changed how Gurugram sees its land. “Haryana has one of India’s lowest forest covers,” Sanwalka says. “But people here now understand what’s at stake. A clean, green city is not the government’s gift, it’s our responsibility.”
Reviving a dying river
In Lucknow, another citizen collective has been quietly waging its own battle, this one against the slow death of the Gomti river.
The initiative, GoForGomti, was started in May 2023 by Prateek Bharadwaj, a former radio jockey based in Lucknow. Inspired by Mann Ki Baat and environmentalist Pradeep Sangwan’s mission to protect the Himalayas from waste and climate damage, Bharadwaj began wondering how he, as an RJ with a loyal following, could use his influence for something tangible. “So I announced on my Instagram story that I’m starting a drive to clean the Gomti, beginning May 7, 2023, a Sunday,” he recalls. “To my disappointment and ego’s shock, only eight people showed up.”
But instead of retreating, he posted photos of that first small effort. “By the next Sunday, 83 people came,” he says. “And we haven’t missed a single Sunday since, that’s over 130 drives so far.”
The team has since pulled out over 25,000 metric tonne of plastic, cleaned dozens of ghats, and given the city a new ritual of responsibility. “Earlier, people came for selfies,” Bharadwaj says. “Now they come for self.”
GoForGomti remains entirely citizen-led and zero-funded. “We registered the initiative only after 100 drives,” he says. “We still haven’t opened a bank account. If someone wants to help, they bring gloves or gumboots. That’s it.”
Volunteers range from 7-year-olds to 70-year-olds, students, doctors, professionals, retirees. “People come before work, after school. It’s a Sunday ritual now,” he smiles. “Some treat it like exercise, others call it meditation. For a few, it’s therapy.”
Even mental health professionals have taken notice. “Doctors and therapists tell their patients to join our drives,” he says. “They say go clean, go connect, it’ll make you feel better. And it works. When you give to your city, you heal a little too.”
Their effort also extends to festivals. During Ganesh Chaturthi, GoForGomti launched ‘Bhoomi Visarjan’, an eco-friendly alternative to idol immersion. “People used to submerge plaster of Paris idols that never dissolved, they just polluted the river or ended up dumped under trees,” Bharadwaj says.
This time, the team helped 50,000 idols get immersed in soil pits instead of water. “We promoted idols made of cow dung or clay,” he says. “We reached 1,500 families, explaining that after visarjan, these idols turn into manure for gardens. It’s beautiful, a cycle of creation and return.”
Social media, he says, has become their classroom. “Instead of using it to spread hate, we use it to educate,” Bharadwaj says. “We talk about plastic, pollution. We show people that small actions matter.”
But the work is far from easy. “Unlike Ganga or Yamuna, Gomti doesn’t come from the mountains,” he explains. “It rises from the ground near Lakhimpur and flows through Lucknow, collecting waste, untreated sewage, and chemicals along the way.”
The city has 17 to 18 sewage outlets, he says, “but most treatment plants don’t work”. And after every clean-up, there’s a new challenge: disposal. “We can clean and collect garbage,” Bharadwaj says, “but where do we take it? Sometimes heaps of plastic stay piled on the banks for days. It smells, it breeds mosquitoes. Unless the municipal departments coordinate, our work gets stuck midway.”
That bureaucratic blame chain, he says, is endless. “Nagar Nigam says it’s the municipality’s job, municipality says it’s Sahibabad’s job, and it goes on,” he shrugs. “So we just keep cleaning.”
Still, the team isn’t losing faith. “I’m 110% sure the change will come,” Bharadwaj says. “Earlier, people knew me as RJ Prateek. Now they call me the GoForGomti guy. That’s progress.”
Now, the initiative is moving from cleaning to cultural revival. Started last Dev Deepawali, GoForGomti has been hosting Gomti Aarti twice a month on Ekadashi. “We do half an hour of sankirtan on the cleaned ghats,” Bharadwaj says. “We want people to come, pray, and then stay to clean. These ghats were once hotbeds for drunkards and drug users, we’d pull out 50 to 60 beer cans every drive. When we light diyas and sing, the same spaces feel sacred again.”
Despite exhaustion and red tape, Bharadwaj remains hopeful. “If our Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who has done great work for law and order in our state, could just visit the ghats once a month, every department would start doing its job,” he says. “We don’t want the river to look good only in pictures. Reel is great, but real also needs to be great.”
The signs of change, he adds, are already visible. “The ghats we cleaned a year ago are still clean,” he says. “People have stopped throwing waste there. Gen Z, who we call lazy, are actually very logical about the environment. They have superb ideas. We’ve seen people give up plastic, switch to clay idols, stop littering. It’s slow, but it’s happening.”
His message is simple: “Be sensitive to the environment you live in. Cities make us self-centred. But take a stand. Do something greater. Build or take part in something that people will remember you for, even after you’re gone.”
Outsider cleaning India
If IAmGurgaon and The Ugly Indian show what sustained local action can achieve, Lazar Jankovic brings an outsider’s clarity to the same cause. “I’m from Belgrade, Serbia,” he says. “I used to model. Now I teach yoga, and clean.”
Jankovic first visited India in 2018. “I fell in love with the country,” he recalls. “But the garbage bothered me. What shocked me more was that everyone pretended it wasn’t there.” He began cleaning whenever he could, often alone. “One day I saw a well-dressed man jump over a pile of garbage outside his building to get into his SUV,” he says. “That image stayed with me.”
In August 2024, he launched an Instagram page called 4CleanIndia and began posting short videos. But it was his Ek Din Ek Gully (One Day One Street) challenge for Independence Day 2025 that went viral. “I invited people to clean one street that day,” he says. “People didn’t mock me, they joined in.”
His videos show him cleaning around temples, parks, mosques, and monuments such as India Gate. “I choose places that people identify with,” he says. “That’s where change becomes visible.”
Jankovic often collaborates with NGOs and resident welfare groups. “There are hundreds of groups already cleaning their neighbourhoods, we just don’t hear about them,” he says. “That needs to change.”
His message is blunt, almost Gandhian in its simplicity. “If we can’t respect our land, we don’t deserve improvement,” he says. “We are the society we’re trying to fix. We can’t wait for someone else to make our lives better.”
Unlike most influencers, his tone is earnest, not performative. “I don’t do it for likes,” he says. “I do it because I can’t look away anymore.” “This country gives you freedom,” he adds. “If there’s a right to litter, there’s also a right to clean. Nobody stops you from doing the right thing.”
United by intimacy
The acts of TUI, IAmGurgaon, GoForGomti, and Jankovic might seem different, one paints, one plants, one sweeps, but they share a common grammar: action before analysis.
Across India, similar efforts are multiplying. PotholeRaja has filled more than 200 potholes in Bengaluru, training women from low-income groups as road repair technicians. In Chandigarh’s Sector 49, a retired Deputy Inspector General of Police, Inderjit Singh Sidhu, now spends his mornings sweeping littered roads himself.
And in Pichhulia village in Jharkhand’s Palamu district, 25 women from a self-help group pooled `70,000 from their welfare stipends to build a dirt road by hand after years of waiting for the administration to act. Together, they represent a quiet shift from complaint to care.
As The Ugly Indian’s coordinator puts it, “Paying taxes and voting aren’t enough. Civic participation must become normal, as ordinary as crossing the street.”
What unites these movements is not ideology but intimacy: the belief that one’s street, park, or river deserves the same respect as one’s home.
Globally, cities from Seoul to Singapore have embraced similar DIY urbanism, where residents co-manage rivers, parks, and green corridors. But in India, the impulse grows not from abundance, but from absence. Here, citizens step in not because they are hobbyists, but because they are tired of waiting. Their work is unpaid, unglamorous, and often unnoticed, yet it transforms the city more profoundly than any Smart City project. “I’ve learned that once you clean, plant or fix something yourself, you stop littering,” says IAmGurgaon’s Sanwalka. “You feel pride and that’s contagious.”
Even TUI’s anonymity has altered urban psychology. Their footpath marathon, where 1,500 people walked only on sidewalks, reframed cleanliness as dignity. “Walking is India’s most common exercise,” their coordinator says. “Clean footpaths mean safety, dignity, and fewer cars. Who can oppose that?”
As dusk falls on Bengaluru, the last volunteers of The Ugly Indian pack up their brushes. In Gurugram, evening walkers pass beneath canopies planted by IAmGurgaon. On the ghats of Lucknow, lamps flicker as GoForGomti prepares for its first aarti. And somewhere in Delhi, a Serbian yoga instructor bends to pick up another plastic cup. They are not policymakers or politicians. They are caretakers. And in their persistence lies a simple truth. Cities don’t change when governments decide, but they change when citizens refuse to step over the mess.
