Context
Recently, President Droupadi Murmu has given away the Swachh Survekshan awards 2023.
Swachh Survekshan Awards
- Swachh Survekshan is conducted by the union ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA) under the Swachh Bharat Urban Mission since 2016.
- It is the world’s largest urban sanitation and cleanliness survey.
- The exercise acts as a competition among towns and cities to improve their cleanliness, waste management service delivery to citizens.
- The primary goal of Swachh Survekshan was 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.
Swachh Survekshan awards 2023
- The Swachh Survekshan, which began with a modest evaluation of 73 major cities in 2016, now covers 4,477 cities.
- This year, which is the eighth year of the survey, a total of 3,000 assessors conducted the assessment of more than 4,500 cities across 46 indicators.
- A total of 4,477 urban local bodies, 61 cantonment boards, 88 Ganga towns and 18,980 commercial areas participated in the survey.
- The theme of the cleanliness survey 2023 was “Waste to Wealth”, while for 2024 it is “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle”.
- Around 12 crore citizen responses were received.
- This year 13 awardees received felicitations under categories of Clean Cities, Cleanest Cantonment, SafaiMitra Suraksha, Ganga Towns and Best Performing State were given away.
Awards 2023
Cities Rank:
Surat in Gujarat and Indore in Madhya Pradesh were jointly declared cleanest cities of the country at the annual clean city awards 2023
- Indore has been adjudged the cleanest city for the seventh time in a row.
- Navi Mumbai bagged the third spot.
The list of top 10 cleanest cities with a population of more than one lakh also includes:
- Greater Visakhapatnam,
- Bhopal,
- Vijayawada,
- New Delhi,
- Tirupati,
- Greater Hyderabad and
- Pune.
State list:
- Maharashtra tops State list
- As far as the States were concerned, Maharashtra came first, followed by Madhya Pradesh and then Chhattisgarh.
- Odisha is ranked fourth, followed by Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Sikkim, Karnataka, Goa, Haryana and Bihar.
Cities with a population of less than one lakh:
- In the category of cities with a population of less than one lakh, Sasvad and Lonavala in Maharashtra as well as Patan in Chhattisgarh secured the top three spots, while the Mhow Cantonment Board in Madhya Pradesh was adjudged the cleanest cantonment board.
Other awards:
- Varanasi and Prayagraj, both in Uttar Pradesh, won the top two awards amongst the cleanest Ganga towns.
- Chandigarh walked away with the award for the Best Safaimitra Surakshit Sheher (safest city for sanitation workers). Twenty zonal awards were bestowed upon medium and small cities.
- Madhyamgram, Kalyani and Haora – all cities from West Bengal – had the dubious distinction of being placed at the bottom, while the States at the end of the list were Rajasthan, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh.