In October 2014, Prime Minister Modi launched an ambitious mission to clean up India. In a country of over a billion, it's obvious that a mission like this can't be a success without voluntary citizen action. We wanted to promote the PM's mission and make every citizen do their part to keep the country clean.

The average Indian’s apathy towards filth on the streets is appalling. In Indian culture, it is really important to keep your personal spaces clean. However, this is not true of public spaces – which remain filthy. We decided to do an activity to remove this dissonance between public and private behaviour.

We decided to spam their inboxes with trash messages to drive home the point. One trash message every 10 minutes to litter their inbox. Every consecutive annoying message reminding them that if trash in their inbox bothers them so much that they move it to the bin immediately, then why doesn’t trash on the streets bother them.

The last message has a hyperlink that directs them to the FB page: Keeda Hai Kya? (Bitten by the cleanliness bug?), where they’re encouraged to volunteer and organise a small clean up drive in their locality, college or office complex. And post their pictures after the clean up act.

In just one week, we sent out over 100,000 SMSs to smartphone users in Delhi, Gurgaon and Mumbai.

The activity and likes on our FB page went up by 300% with people posting pictures and videos of their clean up act.

iCONGO is now partnering with various corporates to take the initiative to 10 million mobile phone users by August.