TUI chooses small segments of road each week to clean: pavements piled up with plastic, defaced walls, footpaths rendered unusable by potholes as spotfixing places.
The Ugly Indians have chosen to remain anonymous as the names and identities of specific individuals are not important [2] and they respond to media queries only by email.
On November 15, 2010, The Ugly Indian was born as a community Facebook page to organize volunteers to clean the streets of Bengaluru.
[6] Church Street is a major tourist attraction and a centerpiece of ‘Brand Bangalore’, the street suffered from a wide variety of filth issues including large trash piles, public urination points, paan stains, broken footpaths and safety issues.
[4][8] The group kicked off their drive to clean the city by removing open dumping, scrubbing paan stains, fixing footpaths and painting previously dirty surfaces up and down the street.
[11][12] Citizens and media persons were invited to ‘find trash’ over a 3 kilometer area, and volunteers marched silently along with them symbolically carrying spades, brooms, paint and brushes in case any ugly spots were found by anyone’.
With their birthday rally, volunteers showcased what they had accomplished in the past year by placing pictures at spot-fixed areas to show people how they looked before intervention.
What followed was one of its largest and longest projects yet near the Koramangala Passport Office where a large cluster of garbage nicknamed ‘The Mother of All Blackspots’ were removed and the space was rehabilitated.
[16] Additionally, their influence was spreading around India with ‘spot fixing’ activities being recorded in places like Mysore, Coimbatore, Chennai, Mumbai and the National Capital region.
[18] Shortly after, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted about The Ugly Indian's Tedx presentation bringing more awareness to the group.
[20] As the group's popularity grew, politicians, government officials and corporations began to take greater notice of the activities of The Ugly Indian.
[21] Interactions with the Mayor BS Sathyanarayana resulted in The Ugly Indians first official collaborations with Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), a relationship that continues today.
[25] By 2018, The Ugly Indian had grown from a ‘Silent Revolution’ involving just a few volunteers to a mature impact organization with thousands of ‘spotfixes’ completed, government and corporate partnerships and an increasing reach across the ever growing City of Bangalore.
In early 2018, BBMP launched the Clean Bengaluru Campaign and The Ugly Indian partnered on several high visibility projects.
[32] As the COVID-19 pandemic receded, The Ugly Indian wasted little time getting back to work on ever more ambitious projects to address cleanliness in public spaces.
2022 saw the introduction of The Ugly Indian's CleanStreet500KMChallenge where the group mapped 500 km of city roads and keep tabs on their cleanliness.
[36] The UFO project has already spread to New Delhi, Pune and Chennai where new groups have taken up the responsibility of cleaning and beautifying these unmaintained spaces.
[37][35][38][39] Project UFO was created in order to combat unwanted posters, open urination, garbage dumping and illegal parking in spaces underneath flyovers.
[40] The basis of Project UFO is to reclaim public spaces under flyovers by cleaning and beautifying them, thus reducing the chance that people will continue to dump waste and place unwanted posters in these areas.
[44][45][46] Political officials such as ex-Mayor K. S. Satyanarayana have participated in similar events and spot fixes under the flag of TUI.
[48] Volunteers are provided with aprons and gloves and work to clean the area and paint the pillars with new, vibrant colors as a way to deter further misuse of the space.
[41] The triangular pattern itself was intended to be easy to paint by novices while being visually engaging enough to drown out any posters that would be placed at eye level.
[41] Cleaning and beautifying spaces under flyovers is the first step, but the most important act is to create an area that people are adverse to dumping garbage in and misusing.
[50] The primary purpose of the beautification and cleaning is to reclaim a public space by using visual cues to dissuade people from littering or dumping.
One of the most vocal opponents of the project is Assa Doron who stated that Project UFO and other movements like it, "[are] a form of aesthetic purification that addresses the dirt seen and smelt, but which has little regard for the wider structures of inequality underpinning public hygiene and waste-picking practices, let alone the question of waste generation, which is the product of capitalist consumption and production.
"[51] He goes on to say that TUI is forcing the ideals of the middle class on society as a whole and are attempting to white wash a problem that has deeper, systemic roots.
The Ugly Indian conducted a comprehensive survey on their UFO Project which audited nearly 2200 pillars (metro & flyover) on 17 April 2019.
TereBins weigh around 20–25 kilograms (44–55 lb) and are meant for paper cups, banana skins, cigarette packets and similar small litter.