ICUC 3.0 — India Clean-Up Confluence

One nation,many missions

It started with one beach. It became a national confluence of everyone cleaning up India — coastlines, lakes, hills, streets. Bringing Cleanup Movements Under One roof.

Get involved How it started

ICUC 1.0
ICUC 2.0
ICUC 3.0

Where it began

Our beach clean-up movement

Carter Clean Up — 3.5 km of Carter Road, Bandra, cleaned every Saturday since 2021.

Before there was a confluence, there was a beach. During the lockdown, Harold Fernandes started clearing plastic off the Carter Road shoreline and its mangroves almost every day. Inspired by that, five of us — Harold, Ashwin Malwade, Nupur Agarwal, Freishia B and Maansi Desai — founded Carter Clean Up on 24 June 2021 to take on the full 3.5-kilometre stretch.

What started as a handful of people became a Saturday ritual that more than ten thousand volunteers have shown up for — 160,000 kilos of marine waste and illegal construction debris pulled off the beach and out of the mangroves. But years of it taught us something no amount of collected waste could: a single shoreline can be held by a single community, a coastline cannot. Willingness was never the bottleneck — every clean-up movement in the country was just solving the same problems alone.

The full Carter Clean Up story

Carter Road, Bandra: Est. 2021
Cleaned every Saturday: 3.5 km
Volunteers, and counting: 10,000+

How ICUC came about

So in 2024 we stopped adding beaches and started adding people — Carter Clean Up invited every clean-up movement in India into one room for one day, to build together what none of us could build alone. That room is the India Clean-Up Confluence.

Convene
Bring clean-up leaders, funders and policymakers into one room, with an agenda they set jointly rather than separately.
Amplify
Give grassroots changemakers a national stage — and the visibility that turns a local drive into a replicable model.
Scale
Move from one-off drives to measured, repeatable systems for waste management and shoreline restoration.

The editions

Three confluences, in order

Each edition picks up where the last one stopped. Read them top to bottom — that is how they happened.

ICUC 1.0Past edition
First time in India
An initiative to foster collaboration for a cleaner future.
Date
Sunday, 20 October 2024
Venue
G5A Warehouse, Mahalaxmi, Mumbai
The first edition was simply a test of the premise: would India's clean-up movements actually show up for each other? They did. Collectives who had never met spent a day comparing methods, disposal routes and volunteer retention — and left with each other's numbers.
- The first national gathering of Indian clean-up collectives
- A full day of open sessions, 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM
- Grassroots organisers, corporates and civic bodies in one room
Recap
ICUC 1.0 — what people said
Press play to relive the day.
ICUC 2.0Past edition
From Ripples to Waves
Turning scattered drives into shared, measurable method.
Date
September 2025
Venue
Mumbai
The second edition scaled the room and sharpened the question — from 'who else is doing this' to 'what actually works, and how do we prove it'. Sessions moved onto measurement, funding and the unglamorous machinery that lets a drive repeat itself every week for a decade.
- 350+ participants and 60+ organisations
- The ICUC Changemaker Awards, honouring grassroots leaders
- Run on solar power instead of diesel generators
Recap
ICUC 2.0 after-movie
ICUC 2.0 — voices from the day
Press play to relive the day.
ICUC 3.0Next up
One Nation, Many Missions
Every mission, mapped — and pointed in the same direction.
Date
Dates to be announced
Venue
To be announced
The next edition takes the confluence past the coastline. Mangroves, lakes, rivers, hills, wards and streets are different missions with different tools — but one nation's waste problem. 3.0 is about making those missions legible to each other, to funders and to policy.
- Missions beyond the shoreline — inland, urban and upland
- A national map of who is cleaning what, and where
- Registration opens closer to the date