The results of Swachh Sarvekshan 2016, a survey of cleanliness in Indian cities with rankings of the cities on cleanliness, were released today.
Mysuru in Karnataka remains the cleanest city in the country while Dhanbad in Jharkhand ranked at the bottom of 73 major cities - state capitals and/or cities with 10-lakh-plus populaion - surveyed for cleanliness last month.
Hyderabad broke into the top 20, ranking 19th this time, up from 275 in 2014. Warangal, also from Telangana, ranked 32, and was the only other place from Telangana in the 73 cities.
Andhra Pradesh saw Visakhapatnam rank 5th, and Vijayawada rank 23rd.
The results of the Swachh Sarvekshan 2016 were released by the Union Minister of Urban Development M Venkaiah Naidu at a media conference in New Delhi today.
Some 53 cities with a population of above ten lakh each, and 22 state capitals were selected for the survey. Noida and Kolkata desired to participate in the next round of the survey.
The top 10 cities in terms of cleanliness, in order of rank, are: Mysuru, Chandigarh, Tiruchirapalli (Tamil Nadu), New Delhi Municipal Council, Visakhapatnam, Surat, Rajkot, Gangtok, Pimpri Chindwad and Greater Mumbai. Visakhapatnam, Surat, Rajkot and Gangtok improved their ranks to break into the top 10 this year.
The bottom 10 cities are: Kalyan Dombivili, Varanasi, Jamshedpur, Ghaziabad, Raipur, Meerut, Patna, Itanagar, Asansol and Dhanbad (ranked 73).
The last cleanliness survey was conducted in 2014 among 476 cities with a population of one lakh and above each. That survey was done before the launch of the Swachh Bharat Mission by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in October 2014. The 476 cities were ranked based on their performance over a large number of parameters like availability of toilets and solid waste management.
Giving the methodology used for Swachh Sarvekshan 2016, Naidu informed that of the total marks of 2,000 that could be scored by a city, 60% were for solid waste management parameters, 30% for construction of toilets, and 5% for city-level sanitation strategy and behavior change communication.
The Quality Council of India which conducted the survey deployed 25 teams of 3 trained surveyors each to visit 42 locations in each city covering major zones like railway stations, bus stations, religious places, major market places, planned and unplanned residential areas including slums, and toilet complexes. The survey teams took a total of 3,066 geo-tagged photos of places visited as evidence, and they were uploaded online today.
Naidu said that all the 73 cities were informed sufficiently in advance so as to make available documentary evidence of their efforts towards improving sanitation for verification by the survey teams. Over one lakh citizens responded with their feedback on cleanliness in their respective cities, making the survey of 2016 evidence-based and participatory.