Clean Pune, Green Pune: Can Citizen Groups Transform the City?

Pune has grown multifold over the past few decades, evolving from a relatively compact city into a rapidly expanding big city. With a growing population, expanding residential and commercial areas, increasing traffic and rising consumption, the city is also facing new environmental challenges. Managing waste, maintaining public spaces, protecting green areas and ensuring cleanliness across a growing urban landscape require more than municipal efforts alone. It requires the active participation of citizens, communities, organisations, businesses and institutions. Pune has repeatedly demonstrated that when people come together with a shared purpose, collective action can create a lasting impact.

While these challenges may appear enormous, the enormity of the waste challenge becomes even more visible during the rainy season. Litter and improperly disposed waste can block drains, lead to waterlogging and create unhygienic conditions. Yet, many of these challenges are closely linked to everyday human behaviour. Littering on roads and public spaces, failing to segregate waste at home, excessive use of disposable products and careless disposal of garbage are choices that individuals make every day. This is precisely why citizens are not merely beneficiaries of a clean city—they are central to the solution. A change in individual behaviour, multiplied across thousands of households and communities, can create a significant city-wide impact.

Citizen groups can play an important role in turning this awareness into collective action. Cleanliness drives, waste segregation campaigns, hill and river clean-ups, tree plantation initiatives and neighbourhood awareness programmes can encourage people to take greater ownership of their surroundings.

The Adar Poonawalla Clean City Initiative (APCCI) has been working to strengthen this spirit of community participation. Through participation in cleanliness initiatives, volunteer engagement and awareness programmes, APCCI encourages citizens to become active partners in creating a cleaner and more sustainable Pune.

The role of citizen groups, however, goes beyond simply picking up litter. Their greatest contribution is behavioural change. When residents begin segregating waste at source, reducing single-use plastic, keeping public spaces clean and motivating others to participate, cleanliness becomes a shared community habit rather than an occasional activity.

Housing societies, schools, colleges, corporate groups and resident associations can all become catalysts for change. Every neighbourhood can identify its own environmental challenges and work collectively towards practical solutions.When citizens become active participants, neighbourhoods become cleaner, communities become stronger and Pune can move steadily towards becoming a healthier, greener and more sustainable city.