The heads of the country’s two largest banks on Monday picked up brooms on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary, and pledged resources and money to make the government’s ‘Clean India’ drive a success.

ICICI Bank’s chief executive Chanda Kochhar announced a plan to train 1.5 lakh individuals for sanitation, health and hygiene awareness programme over the next one month.

SBI Chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya said her bank will increase digital banking to reduce the use of paper which will help the environment as well as lead to better cleanliness.

Lead by Bhattacharya, around 250 senior employees of SBI cleaned the area around the Girgaum Chowpatty in the heart of the city, while Kochhar and her senior management officials cleaned the area near the bank’s branch in the Backbay Reclamation region.

On the occasion, Bhattacharya said the drive will hopefully encourage everyone to come together and help turn Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of a clean India into a reality.

“SBI’s commitment towards digital banking is another way of supporting a clean India as less usage of paper will lead to a lot of reduction in waste and making the environment healthy and a clean place to live,” she said.

Kochhar said, in November 2014, ICICI Bank adopted the ’Clean India Mission’ and since then on every working day, the employees of one branch of the bank have been participating in the initiative by cleaning the area surrounding their office.

“So far, 6,000 of our employees have cleaned the areas near 800 of our branches in over 130 cities,” she said.

Starting tomorrow, ICICI will also organise multiple sanitation, health and hygiene training modules which will be conducted across all the 24 urban centres and over 200 rural centres of ICICI Academy for Skills, and 17 rural self- employment training institutes, she said.

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