On Sunday morning, while most of Gurugram was slowly waking up, a small group of people gathered near the Guru Dronacharya Metro Station. Garbage bags in hand, they bent down to pick wrappers from the pavements, cleared drains blocked with layers of waste, and swept dust from the streets.

At the centre of this effort was a Serbian man with a broom in one hand and determination in the other. His name is Lazar Jankovic, and over the past year, he has turned into an unlikely yet powerful symbol of civic action in India.

Lazar is not here for applause or headlines. He does not run an NGO, nor does he have a fund backing him. His mission is simpler, but also harder: to remind people that keeping their cities clean begins with them.

It is this belief that sparked a movement, one that Gurugram witnessed in full force last weekend.

A Sunday of change

In India, where over 62 million tonnes of waste are generated annually, much of it ends up on the streets, unsegregated and unmanaged. According to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, 40% of plastic waste in India is littered on roads and public spaces.

Incidentally, the Gurugram cleanliness drive this Sunday was not Lazar’s idea. Local residents, inspired by his viral videos, organised it themselves and invited him to join.

“They told me there would be 20 of them ready with bags and brooms, and I thought, why not?” he recalls. Together, they unclogged drains that had been overflowing due to monsoon rains, picked up food wrappers tossed carelessly by passersby, and collected heaps of waste from the streets.

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What struck Lazar most was not the amount of garbage, but how quickly things changed when people acted. “The moment I unclogged one of the drains, the water that had been flooding the........

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