Mumbai slips in cleanliness survey

Mumbai: The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s ambitious plans to improve the city’s cleanliness have suffered a rude jolt as Mumbai has slipped to 29th position in the ‘Swachh Sarvekshan 2017’ from its 10th rank last year.

The development comes despite the fact that the civic body had undertaken various cleanliness initiatives during the past year.

According to Swachh Sarvekshan, carried out as a part of the Swacch Bharat Abhiyan, Indore is India’s cleanest city. Other top 10 cleanest cities are Bhopal, Visakhapatnam, Surat, Mysuru, Tiruchirapalli, New Delhi Municipal Council, Navi Mumbai, Vadodara and Chandigarh.

Union minister of urban development M. Venakaiah Naidu announced the findings of survey, which was conducted in 434 cities and towns of the country.

The survey was carried out by the Quality Council of India (QCI), which accessed 17,500 locations in these cities and towns. The criteria and weightages for different components of sanitation-related aspects used for the survey included factor such as municipal self-declaration about solid waste management including door-to-door collection, processing and disposal and open defecation free (ODF) status.

Weightages for these factors carried 45 per cent of the total 2,000 marks along with citizen feedback (30 per cent) and independent observation (25 per cent).

In the first cleanliness survey conducted in 2014, Mumbai was ranked as low as 147. But two years later, it jumped up to the 10th rank in 2016.

Civic officials were rankled by the ranking. “We will have to study carefully where things went wrong. We were expecting a good show, but it came a cropper,” said a senior civic official. He put the blame on ‘public apathy’ towards registering feedback. “Mumbai secured 299 out of 600 marks in citizen feedback, which is substantially low as compared to top 10 cities. A mere 5,000 people voted for feedback in which hardly 500 were online,” he added.

During the past year, the civic body had undertaken many initiatives to increase the city’s cleanliness like placing mobile toilets, cleanliness in public toilets, wall painting/posters/hoardings, night sweeping, street plays, playing short films in cinema halls, etc.

However, according to civic sources, the BMC’s failure to ensure ODF status was one of the major reasons for the drop in rankings. In December 2016, the civic body declared the city open defecation free excluding the areas that fall under Mumbai Port Trust, railway and central government. However, the QCI team in January visited the city to verify its ODF claims and found open defecation at several places. The BMC finally managed to get the ODF certificate after the QCI team visited again in February.

Apart from this, the failure to ensure waste disposal also added to the city’s woes. The BMC has managed to start a scientific waste processing in Kanjurmarg dumping ground, whereas it has not started at Deonar and Mulund dumping grounds yet.