Project Name: Swachh Bharat
Organisation: Swachh Bharat
Project Location & Coverage Area: Pan India
Project URL: http://swachhbharatapp.com
Area of intervention: Water & Sanitation

In support of the Prime Minister’s (PM) mission, an ordinary citizen named Mahek Shah launched the Swachh Bharat Clean India Mobile App in September 2014. Clean India App, a mobile governance solution, where users can report dirty places with a tweet and a picture which is then sent to the PMO. The app uses users’ twitter account for reporting mechanism. The user has to log in through Twitter if he/she wants to report a problem. Though Twitter is used by only a certain section of the community and not everyone has a Twitter account, Shah believes that the government is much more active on Twitter than any other platform. Once a photo is clicked, the app automatically finds its location using Google Maps and an auto generated tweet is sent to the PMO. So all a person has to do to make a complaint is to click a picture. This app not only enables ordinary citizens to report civic problems to the municipal and government authorities, but brings the issues to the notice of the PM himself.
The app has other interesting features apart from reporting. These include live updates from the Swachh Bharat Mission across the country, videos and tutorials on spot-fixing, the ability to view or create Swachh Bharat spot-fixing events happening around the country, the ability to browse and view their Facebook page which shares more information on spot fixing by individual groups or information shared by village councils and block officers. Users can access the other features of the app without a Twitter login.

Reach & Road Ahead

The app has been downloaded by 12,000 smartphone users, out of which 5,000 are actively using it. Though the app has more than 5,000 downloads, it has been instrumental in getting only 10-15 places ‘fixed’. The photos which are uploaded are monitored by Shah, as many people upload same photos repetitively and some of them are even fakes. Three hundred reports have been filed so far using this app and out of these 180 are genuine reports. So far, more than 15 issues have been resolved. The version one of app is open-sourced – anyone can pick up the code from github and clone it to make a local version. The app can be downloaded from the Google Store. It is an Android app.