Swachh Survekshan Awards: Indore Gets India's Cleanest City Tag for 6th Time in a Row, Surat Retains 2nd Rank

Indore bagged the title of India’s cleanest city for the sixth time in a row as the results of the Central government’s annual cleanliness survey ‘Swachh Survekshan Awards 2022’ were announced on Saturday. Madhya Pradesh secured the first position in the category of best performing states, followed by Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra.

As per the survey results, Tripura has bagged the top rank among the states having fewer than 100 urban local bodies.

In the category of cities having a population of fewer than one lakh, Maharashtra’s Panchgani was ranked number one, followed by Chhattisgarh’s Patan (NP) and Maharashtra’s Karhad.

Haridwar was adjudged the cleanest Ganga town in the category of more than 1 lakh population, followed by Varanasi and Rishikesh.

President Droupadi Murmu gave away the awards to the winners at an event in Delhi. Union Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Singh Puri among others attended the event.

Speaking at the ceremony, Puri said Swachh Bharat Mission started eight years ago as a government initiative is a mass movement today. “Swachhata Survekshan today is the largest sanitation survey in the world, in 2016 it was started as a pilot project in 73 cities and now in 2022 more than 4,355 cities have taken part in it,” he said.

Soon after the announcement of awards, people started celebrating in Indore by bursting crackers and dancing on dhol beats.

What is Swachh Survekshan?

Swachh Survekshan is the world’s largest urban sanitation and cleanliness survey which has been conducted by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs since 2016. The government said that Swachh Survekshan has been instrumental in fostering a spirit of healthy competition among towns and cities to improve their service delivery to citizens and towards creating cleaner cities. It aims to encourage large scale citizen participation and create awareness amongst all sections of society about the importance of working together towards making towns and cities better places to reside in.

The scale of Swachh Survekshan is evidenced in the consistent increase in the number of cities over the years. From surveying 73 major cities in 2016 and 434 cities in 2017 the 7th edition of Swachh Survekshan has become became the world’s largest urban cleanliness survey, with 4,355 cities having participated in the survey. This year’s survey with a “People First” theme captured unprecedented number of citizen feedback this year – over 9 crores, a marked increase from last year’s 5 crores.

President Murmu to Present 6 Cleanliness Awards on Sunday

As part of Swachh Bharat Diwas celebrations on the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, President Droupadi Murmu on Sunday will confer six awards – Swachh Survekshan Grameen (SSG) 2022, Swachhta Hi Sewa 2022, Sujlam 1.0 & 2.0, Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) Functionality Assessment, Har Ghar Jal certification and Start-up Grand Challenge.

The department is implementing two flagship programmes — Swachh Bharat Mission Grameen (SBM-G) and Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) — of the central government. The SBM-G was launched on October 2, 2014 with the aim to stop open defecation. All villages in the country were declared open-defecation free five years later. Thereafter, SBM-G 2.0 was launched in 2020 to sustain the ODF status in villages and improve the level of cleanliness in rural areas through solid and liquid waste management, thereby making villages ODF-plus.

(with PTI inputs)

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