Brands
Vim celebrates India’s cleanest cities with sparkling tribute and floor cleaner discounts
MUMBAI: Hindustan Unilever’s home care brand Vim has rolled out a spirited, city-specific campaign to honour the winners of Swachh Survekshan 2024–25—India’s largest cleanliness survey spearheaded by the ministry of housing and urban affairs. As a nod to the residents of the nation’s cleanest cities, HUL is offering exclusive discounts on its Vim Ultrapro Floor Cleaner range—reinforcing its message that cleanliness begins at home.
Now in its 10th year, Swachh Survekshan has become a national benchmark for urban hygiene and sanitation. In this year’s edition, Indore, Navi Mumbai, and Surat clinched the top ranks in the premier Super Swachh League, while cities like Ahmedabad, Bhopal, and Lucknow were spotlighted as rising stars. Prayagraj earned special praise for its sanitation efforts during the Mahakumbh. A total of 43 national awards were conferred.
Vim’s hyperlocal campaign targets these winning cities with outdoor hoardings, local radio integrations, and hyperlocal influencer content. More than just a promotional push, the initiative is a celebration of civic pride and a bid to trigger sustained behavioural change around cleanliness—both inside homes and across communities.
HUL home care general manager Srinandan Sundaram said, “Cleanliness has long been woven into the fabric of our culture, and Vim proudly stands by this enduring value. Along these lines, Vim has recently gone beyond dishwash and launched Vim Ultrapro Floor Cleaner range with patented biodegradable polymer technology + probiotic actives- which offers deep cleaning and enhanced performance. This campaign reflects our conviction that the path to cleaner cities starts from building the culture of cleanliness & we are celebrating the people from the winning cities for exhibiting the same. By echoing the spirit of Swachh Survekshan, we hope to inspire citizens to embrace cleanliness as a daily habit—and as a shared responsibility that strengthens our communities.”
The campaign also doubles as a spotlight for Vim’s newly launched Ultrapro Floor Cleaner range, which features patented biodegradable polymer technology and probiotic actives. The product promises 100 per cent stain removal, deep cleaning, and exotic fragrances that last up to four hours—a technological upgrade aimed at India’s evolving home hygiene needs.
With this initiative, HUL strengthens its alignment with national cleanliness drives, seamlessly connecting personal hygiene with civic responsibility—one mop at a time.
Brands
Samsung certifies 1,000 Maharashtra students in AI and coding
The South Korean electronics giant marks its first large-scale skilling push in the state, with women making up nearly half the national programme’s enrolment
PUNE: Samsung has put 1,000 students in Maharashtra through a certified training programme in artificial intelligence and coding, the largest such drive the South Korean electronics company has run in the state and a signal that corporate India’s skilling ambitions are moving well beyond the boardroom brochure.
The certifications were awarded under Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), the company’s flagship corporate social responsibility programme, which launched in India in 2022 with the stated aim of democratising access to future-technology education. The 1,000 graduates were drawn from four institutions: 127 from Savitribai Phule Pune University, 373 from Pimpri Chinchwad University, 250 from D.Y. Patil University’s Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology and 250 from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Kalsekar Technical Campus. All completed training in either AI or coding and programming, the two disciplines Samsung has identified as the critical pillars of the digital economy.
The programme does not stop at technical training. Soft-skills development and career-readiness modules are baked into the curriculum, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what universities teach and what employers actually want.
“India’s digital growth story will ultimately be shaped by the quality of its talent pipeline,” said Shubham Mukherjee, head of CSR and corporate communications at Samsung Southwest Asia. “As technologies like AI move from the periphery to the core of industries, skilling must evolve from basic training to building real-world capability. This milestone in Maharashtra reflects how industry and academia can come together to create a future-ready workforce that is both globally competitive and locally relevant.”
The Maharashtra drive sits within a rapidly scaling national effort. Samsung Innovation Campus trained 20,000 young people across India in 2025, hitting its stated target for the year. Women account for 48 per cent of national enrolments, a figure the company cites as evidence of its push for an inclusive technology ecosystem. The programme is implemented in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India and the Telecom Sector Skill Council.
Samsung, which is marking 30 years in India this year, runs SIC alongside two other initiatives, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow and Samsung DOST, as part of a broader effort to build what it calls a generation of innovators with both the technical depth and the problem-solving mindset to thrive in a fast-moving digital world.
A thousand certified students is a tidy headline. Whether they find jobs that match their new skills is the harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether corporate skilling programmes like this one are genuine pipelines or well-photographed gestures.
