Swachh Survekshan 2020

Context

• Recently, the Swachh Survekshan 2020 report has been launched by the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA).
• It is the 5th edition of the annual cleanliness urban survey conducted by the MoHUA.
• It is one of the world’s largest sanitation surveys.

News:

• This year the Ministry has released rankings based on the categorisation of cities on population, instead of releasing overall rankings.
• The categories based on population were introduced in 2019 for the first time but the exact groupings have been changed this year.

Major Categories :

1. Cities with a population of more than 10 lakh:

• Indore was ranked first, securing the rank for the fourth consecutive year, followed by Surat and Navi Mumbai.
• All the National Capital Region (NCR) cities, Greater Mumbai, Bruhat Bengaluru, Amritsar, Kota, Chennai, etc. have performed poorly.
• Patna with the rank 47, is at the bottom of the list.

2. Cities with a population of 1-10 lakh:

• Chhattisgarh’s Ambikapur has been surveyed as the cleanest city in the country, followed by Mysore and New Delhi.
• Bihar’s Gaya with a rank of 382, is at the bottom.

3. Cities with a population of less than 1 lakh:

• Karad has been ranked as the cleanest followed by Sasvad and Lonavala (all three in Maharashtra).

Other Categories:

• Varanasi has been ranked the cleanest among 46 Ganga towns.
• Jalandhar got the top rank among cantonments.
• New Delhi was the cleanest capital city.
• Chhattisgarh was ranked the cleanest State out of those with over 100 urban local bodies (ULBs) or cities.
• Jharkhand was the cleanest state with less than 100 ULBs or cities.
• The dynamic and evolving nature of the Swachh Survekshan framework was also highlighted. From being just a monitoring framework for measuring outcomes, it has become an implementation accelerator for Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (SBM-U), enabling sustainability of outcomes by institutionalizing cleanliness.
• SBM-U was launched in 2014, with the objective of making urban India 100% Open Defecation Free (ODF) along with 100% scientific solid waste management.
• It has a deep impact on health, livelihoods, quality of life and behaviour, which proved to be very helpful while dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic as well.
• MoHUA is also actively working on coming up with a second phase of the SBM-U (SBM 2.0), which was initially supposed to be till March 2020 but has been extended till March 2021.
• It envisions to:
  • Take current targets further, making cities open defecation-free, including 100% sludge management and zero dumping of waste in the open.
  • Safe containment, transportation and disposal of faecal sludge and septage from toilets and also the grey and black water from households and establishments.
  • Treat all wastewater before discharging into water bodies and their maximum possible re-use.
  • Provide adequate safety gear and mechanised equipment to all sanitation workers with maximum attention.
  • To ensure the sustainability of the on-ground performance of cities, the MoHUA also introduced Swachh Survekshan League in 2019.
  • It is a quarterly cleanliness assessment of cities and towns done in three quarters with 25% weightage integrated into the final Swachh Survekshan results.
  • In July 2020, MoHUA launched the sixth edition of the survey, Swachh Survekshan 2021 and also introduced a new performance category, the Prerak DAUUR Samman.
  • It has a total of five additional subcategories namely Divya (Platinum), Anupam (Gold), Ujjwal (Silver), Udit (Bronze) and Aarohi (Aspiring).