The Ugly Indians (TUI) are an anonymous group of volunteers who clean roads in India. Volunteers can join TUI by sending a mail to The Ugly Indian or by registering one's name and email address on TUI's official Facebook page.
Spotfixing TUI calls cleaning the street "spotfixing". TUI chooses small segments of road each week to clean: pavements piled up with plastic, defaced walls, footpaths rendered unusable by potholes as spotfixing places. All tools, materials and instructions are provided on the spot. All spot-fixes are self-funded and volunteers are requested to make a contribution towards material costs.
Guidelines for volunteers
The Ugly Indian's philosophy is "Kaam chalu mooh bandh. Stop Talking, Start Working." Apart from this, TUI has general guidelines regarding spot-fixing. No lectures, no moralising, no activism, no self-righteous anger. No confrontation, no arguments, no debates, no pamphlets, no advocacy. Don't step on anyone's toes, don't take sides in any ideological debates. Support existing systems and improve their effectiveness for the greater good. Basically, get real. Treat everyone with sincerity, respect and dignity first, and the greater good will be an outcome."
Solution TUI recognizes the spot-fix as a success only if: It lasts for at least 90 days. It requires no ongoing supervision. It is low-cost (ideally free) and easy to implement and replicate It changes the behaviour and attitudes of all concerned It creates minimal disruption in the daily actions of everyone concerned (nobody should lose a job, lose a source of income, or get seriously inconvenienced – because it takes only one Ugly Indian to undo the good work of a hundred others)
Anonymity Anonymity is a big attraction of the movement. The Ugly Indian describes itself as a "faceless, leaderless" volunteer organization. It is made up of self-driven and motivated people who are mostly professionals in the 25–40 age group. They remain strictly anonymous. The Ugly Indians have chosen to remain anonymous as the names and identities of specific individuals are not important and they respond to media queries only by email. This TEDx talk from 2014 provocatively titled 'Why is India so Filthy?' and delivered anonymously, outlines the philosophy of The Ugly Indian.
History
Early days (2010–2011) On November 15, 2010, The Ugly Indian was born as a community Facebook page to organize volunteers to clean the streets of Bengaluru. The group consisted of Bangaloreans deeply concerned about the conditions of civic spaces and attitudes of people towards them. The Ugly Indian started their mission by first observing and learning about conditions on the ground attempting to “understand why we [Bengalureans] have such low civic standards and tolerate incredible amounts of filth on the streets.” From the start, The Ugly Indian has eschewed publicity and has wished to remain anonymous. Members consisted of a volunteer force of self-motivated working professionals looking to go out to make a difference in their community. According to a 2011 Deccan Herald interview, one volunteer stated, “There has been no attempt to recruit volunteers or seek publicity. This is just a few people who decided to go and 'do' things rather than talk about them. And others who saw them / heard about them are doing the same. It's as simple as that.”
The Ugly Indian project gained momentum after conducting several small experiments based on their observations to understand what tactics and techniques work and do not work at keeping public spaces clean. Their motto and work philosophy is kaam chalu mooh bandh (Stop Talking, Start Doing).
Their earliest efforts in Bengaluru started on MG Road and Church Street, a bustling commercial and nightlife area in the heart of Bengaluru's Central Business District. Church Street is a major tourist attraction and a centerpiece of ‘Brand Bangalore’, the street suffered from a wide variety of filth issues including large trash piles, public urination points, paan stains, broken footpaths and safety issues. The group kicked off their drive to clean the city by removing open dumping, scrubbing paan stains, fixing footpaths and painting previously dirty surfaces up and down the street. The improvements completed by The Ugly Indian on Church Street were a manifestation of the knowledge gained from observing and experimenting and showed evidence that their approach did indeed work; traders on the street began better maintaining their street and citizens delighted in the new “not-so-ugly” Church Street.
Part of these early initiatives included The Ugly Indian's TereBin program that began in mid 2011. This program set out to install individual or business sponsored dustbins at various points along Church Street, MG Road and Brigade Road. The dustbins were designed to be attractive, easy to use and help reduce littering in these areas. Aside from keeping public spaces clean, the program was also designed to help waste pickers manage litter with proper equipment, create good jobs and bring about further attitude changes of the public. According to one volunteer, “The idea is to give dignity to the process of garbage clearance - only when we, as a society, respect our sanitation workers, will there be a sustainable change.”
On November 12, 2011, The Ugly Indian celebrated its first anniversary by throwing a unique challenge called the ‘Ugly Indian Treasure Hunt’. Citizens and media persons were invited to ‘find trash’ over a 3 kilometer area, and volunteers marched silently along with them symbolically carrying spades, brooms, paint and brushes in case any ugly spots were found by anyone’. None were found, and the streets were declared ‘clean’. This was the first of many such ‘Trashure Hunts’ organized by The Ugly Indian – a unique way to allow for public inspection of clean streets. With their birthday rally, volunteers showcased what they had accomplished in the past year by placing pictures at spot-fixed areas to show people how they looked before intervention.
The activities being conducted by volunteers over the last year on and around Church Street had left many in Bangalore wondering just who were behind this “Silent Revolution” taking place on the streets of the city. When the New York-based magazine “Time Out” launched its Bangalore edition, it asked this question on its cover – The Ugly Indian: ‘Who the Hell are They?’
Beginning of partnership with government agencies (2012–2013)
Beginning in 2012, The Ugly Indian began to expand its area of influence, take on a wider variety of projects and partner with more organizations. In September 2012, with support from Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL), the Ugly Indian set their sights on the Namma Metro pillars below the Trinity Station. U A Vasanth Rao, general manager (finance) of BMRCL, sent out workers of BMRCL to participate in the clean-up activity alongside volunteers. 150 participants in total washed paan stains from the pillars, cleaned up the mess and added designs to the pillars to discourage further spitting.
In May 2013, The Ugly Indian, with the help of BESCOM officials, painted 100 BESCOM electrical boxes in 29 days. BESCOM Managing Director, P Manivannan was quoted in The New Indian Express saying, “It is a path-breaking achievement by them. They have shown the people how to go beyond just talking about things. We appreciate the group coming forward [to do this work].”
In late 2013, The Ugly Indian ran the Ugly Indian Beauty Contest where members of the public voted to choose the best candidate for an intervention and beautification. What followed was one of its largest and longest projects yet near the Koramangala Passport Office where a large cluster of garbage nicknamed ‘The Mother of All Blackspots’ were removed and the space was rehabilitated. The spot was chosen by the public. Waste was removed, new footpaths were installed, walls painted trees were painted and nearly 600 ft of public space was reclaimed. A wide variety of people came out to help including: BBMP garbage staffers, pourakarmikas, cleaning maids, shopkeepers, paanwallas, office staff, staff from BESCOM, BSNL & BWSSB and volunteer citizens.
Scale and impact: local and international (2014–2017)
Since its creation, the group has inspired several other volunteer organizations in Bangalore and beyond. By 2014, there were at least five known Bangalore-based volunteer organizations formed to further The Ugly Indian's mission: Whitefield Rising, Banaswadi Rising, Koramangala Rising, Indiranagar Rising, Jayanagar Rising. Additionally, their influence was spreading around India with ‘spot fixing’ activities being recorded in places like Mysore, Coimbatore, Chennai, Mumbai and the National Capital region.
At Tedx Bangalore 2014, an anonymous volunteer of The Ugly Indian presented the group's vision for Bangalore's public spaces and showcased their work. Shortly after, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted about The Ugly Indian's Tedx presentation bringing more awareness to the group. Since posted on YouTube, the video has been viewed 4.7 million times. As the group's popularity grew, politicians, government officials and corporations began to take greater notice of the activities of The Ugly Indian. In mid 2014, Bengaluru's Mayor BS Sathyanarayana joined citizen volunteers to help with a ‘spotfix’ to reclaim an underground pedestrian subway at KR Circle and again at a ‘spotfix’ at Thyagarajanagar in Basavanagudi ward. Interactions with the Mayor BS Sathyanarayana resulted in The Ugly Indians first official collaborations with Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), a relationship that continues today. In 2015, The Ugly Indian was named in US based business magazine Fast Company's list of The World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies of 2015 in India.
In 2015, The Ugly Indian in partnership with Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) launched their ‘Under the Flyover’ (UFO) project to reclaim areas under flyovers. The ambitious project fixed more than 25 flyovers across the city by hauling out trash, removing posters and painting vibrant geometric patterns on the pillars of the flyovers.
Hard at work (2018–2019)
By 2018, The Ugly Indian had grown from a ‘Silent Revolution’ involving just a few volunteers to a mature impact organization with thousands of ‘spotfixes’ completed, government and corporate partnerships and an increasing reach across the ever growing City of Bangalore. In early 2018, BBMP launched the Clean Bengaluru Campaign and The Ugly Indian partnered on several high visibility projects. In late 2018, The Ugly Indian helped BBMP identify garbage blackspots in the city to participate in the ‘blackspot challenge’ that eradicated 200 blackspots October 1 - November 20, 2018.
In 2019, The Ugly Indian teamed up with BBMP for a new initiative called ‘Adopt a Street’ inviting citizens and corporations to maintain visual cleanliness of city streets. The program consisted of three categories: street cleaning, street greening and street walkability and sought to improve conditions of streets in all of these categories. The program was designed to come at no cost to BBMP and required adopting organizations to support the costs of improvement from their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Program and relying on volunteers to conduct the work.
COVID-19 (2020–2021)