Special Campaign 6.0 to Run in Ministries from 2 October

The annual housekeeping drive of the Union government is about to move from planning to execution. Special Campaign 6.0, aimed at cleanliness in government offices and the disposal of pending matters, enters its implementation phase from 2 October to 31 October 2026. The preparatory phase ran from 16 September to 30 September 2026. The Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, known as DARPG, is the nodal department for the exercise, now in its sixth year.

What the preparatory phase covered

Ministries and departments named nodal officers for every campaign office in their attached and subordinate offices, public sector undertakings and autonomous bodies, and trained them for the drive. The groundwork included activating field staff, listing pending references, settling which offices go on the cleanliness list, estimating how much electronic waste is to be cleared and fixing the way it will be disposed of. Plans were also drawn for waste to wealth work, better use of office space, weeding of old records and preservation of the records worth keeping. Progress is tracked on a dedicated web portal at scdpm.nic.in, where every ministry has to upload its targets.

The review meeting

The second meeting of nodal officers was chaired by DARPG Secretary Nivedita Shukla Verma. More than 40 senior officers attended in person and over 800 joined online from more than 500 locations, representing 84 ministries and departments along with their undertakings and field offices. Additional Secretary Puneet Yadav presented the progress. Departments including Posts, Financial Services, Defence Production, Military Affairs, Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Railways, External Affairs, Mines, the Central Board of Direct Taxes and the environment ministry showed what they had achieved in the previous edition. Awareness work has been wide: 1,039 tweets and 54 statements from the Press Information Bureau have gone out so far. A collection of best practices will be issued as part of Good Governance Week 2026.

This year's focus and a departmental example

The theme of the campaign this year is the effective collection, segregation and disposal of electronic waste, handled under the E-Waste (Management) Rules, 2022. The Department of Chemicals and Petrochemicals offers a sense of scale from the previous round in October 2025: scrap disposal earned it revenue of more than Rs 9.18 lakh, an area of 7,156 square feet was freed, 4,792 physical files were reviewed and 237 weeded out, while 1,275 electronic files were reviewed and 170 closed. The department carried out 93 cleanliness activities in all.