PIB Tracker₹5,000 crore of scrap over five years, and no pendency figure is given
The portal for Special Campaign 6 was launched with a five-year ledger of scrap revenue, freed office space and weeded files — and not one number for the pendency the campaign is named for.
What happened
- Dr. Jitendra Singh, Minister of State in the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, launched the web portal for Special Campaign 6 on 16 September 2026.
- The five-year account he gave is ₹5,000 crore earned from scrap disposal, 1,000 lakh square feet of office space freed, more than 24 lakh cleanliness campaign sites and around 2 crore files weeded out.
- He set that against the early experience, when around ₹20 crore was initially generated through scrap disposal.
- The campaign window is 2 October, Gandhi Jayanti, to 31 October, Sardar Patel Jayanti, which the Minister said should be read as an annual reiteration rather than a month of activity.
- Secretary, DARPG, Smt. Nivedita Shukla Verma said the upgraded platform allows real-time monitoring across the preparatory, implementation and evaluation phases and carries a dedicated e-waste tracking module.
For Prelims
- Special Campaign 6.0: the sixth edition of the Central Government's Swachhata and pendency drive, running 2 October to 31 October 2026, Gandhi Jayanti to Sardar Patel Jayanti.
- Nodal department: the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG), whose Secretary is Smt. Nivedita Shukla Verma; the portal was launched by the MoS for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions.
- Scrap revenue: ₹5,000 crore earned through scrap disposal over five years, against around ₹20 crore generated in the campaign's early experience.
- Office space: 1,000 lakh square feet of government office space freed over the same five years.
- Files: around 2 crore files weeded out for improved record management.
- Sites: more than 24 lakh cleanliness campaign sites undertaken across the five years.
- Special Campaign 6 portal: an upgraded digital platform giving real-time monitoring in the preparatory, implementation and evaluation phases, with a dedicated e-waste module tied to the e-waste management rules.
- Coverage: offices and public spaces including remote locations, public sector undertakings, autonomous organisations, missions abroad and citizen-facing establishments such as post offices, schools and railway stations.
For UPSC: The cleanest available example of campaign-mode administration inside the bureaucracy, and of how such a campaign reports itself. Use it on administrative reform and DARPG, on the difference between output and outcome indicators in governance, and on records management, file disposal and pendency as measurable civil service problems.
What it is NOT: The release gives no pendency figure of any kind — no count of references, grievances or cases disposed, and no pending stock they were disposed against — although reduction of pendency is one of the campaign's stated objects. It also gives no edition-by-edition split of the five-year totals and no target for Special Campaign 6.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS2.16 · GS2.15 · Linkage L2
Anchor
A government that wants to prove it has reformed itself reaches for the numbers it can weigh: crores realised from scrap, square feet of floor, crores of files. Five editions of the Special Campaign have produced exactly that ledger, and nothing at all about the pendency the campaign is named for.
Substantiation (data)
The five-year account is ₹5,000 crore earned from scrap disposal, 1,000 lakh square feet of office space freed, more than 24 lakh cleanliness campaign sites and around 2 crore files weeded out. The early edition generated around ₹20 crore from scrap, which is the scale the exercise started from.
Exemplification
The design is visible in the sixth edition's instrument: an upgraded portal that monitors the preparatory, implementation and evaluation phases in real time and carries a dedicated module for tracking e-waste, so the campaign now measures a waste stream it previously only cleared.
Counterpoint
Against the charge that this is annual theatre, the reach is not trivial — remote offices, public sector undertakings, autonomous organisations, missions abroad, post offices, schools and railway stations — and the Minister's own framing is that the October window is a reiteration of a year-round obligation, not the obligation itself.
Problematisation
Every published figure is an output: money realised, space vacated, files removed. None is an outcome: no disposal rate, no time-to-decision, no closing stock of pending references. A campaign whose stated objects include minimising pendency has published a five-year record in which pendency does not appear as a number.
Position
Campaign-mode administration works on what is countable and visible, and the Special Campaign has genuinely changed the physical state of government offices. It becomes administrative reform only when the same dashboards report the stock of pending matters they were built to reduce.
Deploys into: Civil services and administrative reform + governance and e-governance (GS2.16, GS2.15) · output versus outcome indicators in measuring government performance · records management, file disposal and pendency in the Union government · whether campaign-mode drives produce durable institutional change.
Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions · 2026-09-16 · PRID 2311004 · PIB source ↗