New Delhi: Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs, Hardeep Singh Puri launched ‘Swachh Survekhsan’ League 2020 today, which will be integrated with the fifth edition of ‘Swachh Survkeshan’ – the annual cleanliness survey to assess cities and towns of India on their cleanliness quotient. In a bid to sustain the onground performance and efforts of cities and ensure continuous monitoring of service level progress, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) has introduced Swachh Survekhsan (SS) league 2020.
Also Read: Swachh Survekshan 2019 : Ambikapur Jumps 15 Positions, Adjudged India’s Cleanest City Number 2
As part of the SS league 2020, there will be a quarterly cleanliness assessment of cities and towns in India. The initial assessment will be conducted in three quarters – April to June, July to September and October to December. Each quarter will carry a weightage of 2000 marks.
Also Read: Swachh Survekshan 2019: Here’s What Indore Did To Retain Its ‘Cleanest City Of India’ Title
In every quarter, cities and towns will be evaluated on the basis of monthly updation of Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban online dashboard or Management Information System (MIS) by cities along with citizen’s validation on the 12 service level progress (which includes collection and transportation of municipal solid waste, processing and disposal of municipal solid waste, IEC, among others) indicators through outbound calls. These two parameters will together determine the quarterly ranking of cities, said Durga Shanker Mishra, Secretary, MoHUA.
The quarterly assessment of cities will assign ranks in two categories – cities with a population of one lakh and above and cities with a population of less than one lakh. The quarterly rank of cities will play a crucial role in their annual ranking in Swachh Survekshan 2020 because of the 25 per cent weightage given to the quarterly assessment. The annual assessment will be conducted between January-February 2020.
Talking about the need for a quarterly evaluation mechanism, Mr Puri said,
Every year, the Swachh Survekshan is redesigned innovatively, to ensure that the process becomes more and more robust, with focus on sustaining the changed behaviours. However, one concern that was commonly voiced was that cities cleaned themselves up just before a survey and slipped down after that. This year, therefore, we are launching the ‘Continuous Survekshan’ – the SS 2020 League, where cleanliness assessments will happen throughout the year – similar to the continuous assessments that are followed in schools and colleges – and feed into the larger annual survey in January 2020.
In SS league 2020, special focus has been given to parameters pertaining to reuse and treatment of waste water and fecal sludge management.
All About Swachh Survekshan
The process of ranking cities and town of India on the basis of cleanliness was first conducted in 2016, which covered 73 cities. The second and third round of the survey in 2017 and 2018 widened the coverage of the assessment to 434 cities with a population of one lakh and above and 4,203 cities respectively. The recently concluded fourth edition of the survey which was 100 per cent digital and paperless, was conducted across 4,237 towns and cities and 62 Cantonment Boards, impacting around 40 crore people.
While in 2016, Mysuru, the third most populous city in Karnataka was crowned ‘India’s Cleanest City’, in 2017, 2018, and 2019 Indore was declared India’s Cleanest City.
Status Of Urban India Under Swachh Bharat Mission
Currently urban areas of 23 states that is 4,165 cities (out of 4,378, i.e. 95 per cent of all cities) have achieved the coveted open defecation free (ODF) tag. Of the total 4,165 cities that are ODF, while 377 have been certified ODF plus, 167 have been certified ODF plus plus.
In terms of access to sanitation facilities, more than 96% of our toilet construction targets (for Individual toilets as well as community/public toilets) already met, and we are well on track to achieve our sanitation targets, added Mr Puri.
As far as waste management is concerned, around 90 per cent of the wards have door-to-door waste collection system and 64 per cent of the wards are practising waste segregation at source. Also, 50 per cent of the total waste generated is processed.
Also Read: Swachh Survekshan 2019 Results: Here Are India’s Cleanest Cities
NDTV – Dettol Banega Swachh India campaign lends support to the Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM). Helmed by Campaign Ambassador Amitabh Bachchan, the campaign aims to spread awareness about hygiene and sanitation, the importance of building toilets and making India open defecation free (ODF) by October 2019, a target set by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when he launched Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in 2014. Over the years, the campaign has widened its scope to cover issues like air pollution, waste management, plastic ban, manual scavenging and menstrual hygiene. The campaign has also focused extensively on marine pollution, clean Ganga Project and rejuvenation of Yamuna, two of India’s major river bodies.
