Swachh Survekshan 2020 results are now out and Indore city in Madhya Pradesh emerged as the cleanest city for the fourth time in a row in the category of more than one lakh population, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development announced on Thursday.
India's cleanest cantonment was awarded to Jalandhar in Punjab and the best Ganga town was given to Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's constituency, in Uttar Pradesh.
The Swachh Survekshan awards were announced by Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri. It monitors the performance of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, launched in 2014. The survey was conducted in 4,242 cities, 62 cantonment boards, and 92 Ganga towns and was completed in 28 days. It saw the registration of 1.7 crore citizens on Swachhata App, over 11 crore impressions on social media, more than 5.5 lakh sanitary workers linked to social welfare schemes, and over 84,000 informal waste-pickers integrated into the mainstream.
Mysuru in Karnataka had won the award for the cleanest city in the first edition of the survey in 2016, while Indore had retained the top position for three consecutive years.
This year, Indore is followed by Surat city in Gujarat and Navi Mumbai in Maharashtra. Meanwhile, in the category of less than one lakh population, Karad, Saswad, and Lonavala cities in Maharashtra emerged victorious.
Ahmedabad in Gujarat ranked first in the cleanest mega-city category, while Chhattisgarh's Ambikapur secured the cleanest smallest city tag. Bengaluru won the best self-sustainability award in the mega-city category and Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh won the award in the small city category.
Chhattisgarh ranked first in the category of best performing states with more than a hundred urban local bodies, while Jharkhand emerged first in the less than one hundred category.
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Best city in terms of maximum citizen participation award in the category of the population of over one lakh has been given to Uttar Pradesh's Shahjahanpur. In the same category for cities with a population of less than one lakh, the award was bagged by Nandaprayag in Uttarakhand.
New Delhi Municipal Council secured the cleanest capital city tag, while Lucknow and Bhopal won the fastest mover capital and most sustainable capital award respectively in the pan-India survey.
How Swachh Survekshan originated?
On October 2, 2014, Prime Minister Modi revamped the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, an existing sanitation program launched in 2012, into Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM). The aim of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan was to eradicate open defecation and provide 100 percent access to toilets by 2019. To achieve this stiff goal in a short span of five years, the SBM was introduced as two sub-missions – Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) and Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban).
In an effort to encourage cities to improve the level of cleanliness, sanitation, and hygiene and at the same time generate large scale citizen participation in Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban), in 2016, the Ministry of Urban Development commissioned an extensive survey called Swachh Survekshan.