New Delhi: For the sixth straight time, Indore, Madhya Pradesh, has emerged as the cleanest city in India, this year’s cleanliness survey of India’s urban local bodies (ULB) in India shows.
The Swachh Survekshan 2022, the seventh edition of a survey started in 2016 to assess sanitation levels of India’s cities under the Swachh Bharat Mission, also shows that Surat (Gujarat) and Navi Mumbai (Maharashtra) followed Indore in second and third positions.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs released the survey results at a ceremony at Talkatora Stadium in Delhi Saturday.
“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,” Union Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri said at the Swachh Survekshan Awards 2022 ceremony.
A press release issued by the Press Information Bureau said that Delhi — which had officially merged its four civic bodies in May this year — came in at the ninth position and Noida in Uttar Pradesh came in at the eleventh.
Chandigarh, a city whose urban planning has earned it the sobriquet the ‘City Beautiful’, came in at No 12.
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Best performing state, the cleanest ‘Ganga town’
Indore is Madhya Pradesh’s largest and most populated city. After last year’s survey, ThePrint reported that its sanitation infrastructure, garbage segregation and its “reduce, reuse and recycle” formula had contributed significantly toward Indore’s journey of being India’s cleanest city.
Madhya Pradesh’s Bhopal was the second city to make this year’s top 10 list. It came in at No. 6.
Among the category of the states having less than 100 urban local bodies, Tripura bagged the top rank, the survey results show.
Panchgani in Maharashtra topped the list in the category of cities or towns with ‘less than 1 lakh’ population, followed by Patan of Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra’s Karad.
Madhya Pradesh emerged as the best-performing state, relegating Chhattisgarh — the state that had been bagging the top position in the last three years – to No.2 Maharashtra bagged the third spot.
Tripura emerged as the cleanest state among those with fewer than 100 ULBs, dislodging Jharkhand, the survey results show.
Haridwar was adjudged the cleanest Ganga town — towns through which the river Ganga flows— in the category of more than 1 lakh population, followed by Varanasi and Rishikesh.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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