Microsoft’s Project Sangam enables India’s Swachh Bharat Mission

Microsoft India partnered with The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) to deploy Microsoft’s Project Sangam (cloud-hosted, mobile-first community learning platform) to train functionaries and officers across India on Swachh Bharat e-Learning Portal. Through this partnership, MoHUA has successfully trained 110,000+ municipal functionaries on best sanitation practices across 4000 plus cities in India.

Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) is a nation-wide campaign in India that aims to clean up the streets, roads and infrastructure of India’s cities, towns, and rural areas. To successfully execute this campaign, MoHUA wanted to standardize, centralize, modernize, and establish systems for knowledge exchange and capacity development to train thousands municipal functionaries spread across cities in India. Partnership with Microsoft to use the cloud powered Project Sangam, enabled delivery of large-scale, far-spread training programs with high quality and efficiency. The Sangam platform was designed to train municipal functionaries of state sanitation missions, city managers – engineers, administrators, field supervisors and sanitation workers with an aim to equip, assess, measure and accredit training of these officers.

Project Sangam empowered the Municipal functionaries by enabling MoHUA to run custom community training courses and track their process, manage content, users and analytics across the program in one place. It also provided video-based learning for users who have low-bandwidth supporting offline learning for the Swachh Bharat e-Learning Portal users.

Commenting on the partnership Shri V.K. Jindal, Joint Secretary & National Mission Director – SBM (U) said, “The objective behind Swachh Bharat Abhiyan has been to improve urban sanitization by encouraging large scale participation and spreading awareness amongst all sections of society. This partnership with Microsoft has helped increase adoption of best practices and equipped the workers with the knowledge they need to perform their tasks much more efficiently. We are already witnessing the phenomenal success of this partnership and the technology support by Microsoft is integral to that.

“As there are different states working towards a common mission of Swachh Bharat, there is a need for having standardized and centralized practices for cleanliness. Project Sangam is a perfect fit for training the municipal workers with skilling content that is simple and easy to consume, ensuring high course completion rates and increased attendance. It has been designed to enable organizations to reach the length & breadth of their target audience. Irrespective of the end user, the Sangam portal provides an excellent opportunity for a continuous learning process. This is a great example of how innovative use of technology can be leveraged to empower organizations and individuals from all walks of life,” said Anil Bhansali, Corporate Vice President, Cloud & AI, Microsoft.

In the phase two of this Swachh Bharat e-learning mission, the Ministry will now roll out Citizen Training program with aim to train citizens of India on subjects like public toilets hygiene, waste management, household hygiene, sanitation practices