New Delhi: Maintaining its success streak, Indore, the city of lakes and palaces, emerged as the cleanest city title for the sixth consecutive year, in the ‘more than 1 lakh population’ category, while Surat was adjudged the second cleanest city, for the second time in a row. Navi Mumbai bagged the third spot.
The ranking of clean cities were announced in the results of Swachhata Survekshan (SS), which was released by President Droupadi Murmu at a function held in New Delhi on Saturday. Union minister for housing and urban affairs Hardeep Singh Puri was also present.
In the population category of ‘less than 1 lakh’, Panchgani and Karad from Maharashtra bagged the first and third positions respectively, while Patan from Chhattisgarh bagged the second position. Tirupati received the best city award in Safai Mitra Suraksha while Haridwar in Uttarakhand received the award for the best Ganga town in more than one lakh population cities. Shivamogga in Karnataka received the fast mover city award.
Indore further cemented its position by emerging as India’s first 7-star Garbage Free city, while Surat, Bhopal, Mysuru, Navi Mumbai, Vishakhapatnam, and Tirupati earned 5-star Garbage Free certifications.
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The State awards saw a few surprises. Madhya Pradesh emerged as the ‘Cleanest State’ in the category of “more than 100 Urban Local Bodies”, relegating Chhattisgarh, the Cleanest State of the previous 3 years, to second place. Maharashtra emerged as third cleanest State. Similarly, Tripura emerged as the Cleanest State award in the “less than 100 ULBs category”, dislodging Jharkhand, which had won in the last 2 consecutive years. Jharkhand and Uttarakhand received the second and third spots respectively.
Patna ranks 38 out of 58 cities in cleanliness
Patna has been ranked 38th out of 58 cities with a population of 10 lakhs, even as it jumped six places from the last year. Last year it was ranked 44th out of 47 cities. Not only this, for the first time Patna has been included in ODF ++, which is a big achievement.
Patna municipal corporation (PMC) has performed well in all three categories namely Citizen Voice, Service Level Progress and Certification. The garbage collection is being done by the corporation from 100% wards. Patna got 1200 marks in this category. At the same time, Patna’s performance is also the best in Citizen Voice, where it has got 1536 marks. At the same time, Patna has joined ODF ++ cities for the first time. Patna got 600 marks in this.
Ranchi’s position slips down
Ranchi has been ranked 39 with 3068 scrore, which is one level below the last year’s standing of the city in SS. Dhanbad got 35th rank with its municipal corporation achieving 3527 marks in terms of cleanliness. However, Jamshedpur managed to get 14th position among the cities with less than 10 lakh population.
4,355 participated in this year’s SS
Over the years, Swachh Survekshan (SS) has emerged as an effective tool for transforming the urban landscape. This year’s Survekshan was participated by 4,355 cities, also saw an unprecedented number of citizens’ feedback – over 9 crores, compared to 5 cores last year. In all, 22 States and 5 UTs received awards, of whom 8 States received more than 10 awards each. 8 States and 5 UTs have shown improvements ranging between 5 – 25% in their overall ground level performance over last year.
Of them, 4 out the 8 North Eastern states have shown significant improvement in the overall performance over the last year. Moreover, 10 Cantonment Boards (against 7 CBs last year) and 2 Ganga towns received awards. A heartening feature of the awards was that smaller cities with population of less than 25,000 have performed admirably in the survey, with 40 of them receiving awards today.