New Delhi: Indore is the cleanest city in India, closely followed by Bhopal, Visakhapatnam, Surat, Mysuru, Tiruchirapally and the New Delhi Municipal Council, according to a government survey released on Thursday. The other cities that made it to the cleanest list are Navi Mumbai, Vadodara and Chandigarh; while among the dirtiest are Gonda and Hardoi in Uttar Pradesh, Bhusawal in Maharashtra, Katihar in Bihar and Muktsar in Punjab, according to the study “Swachchh Survekshan 2017”, which was conducted in 434 cities and towns.
Union urban development minister M. Venkaiah Naidu, who announced the results of the survey, described Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, followed by Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, as the “movers and shakers” for having significantly improved their rankings from that of the survey conducted in 2014 before the launch of the Swachchh Bharat Mission. The “Swachchh Survekshan” survey was last done in 2016.
Out of all the cities surveyed, those in Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand have substantially improved the rankings over that of 2016 and 2014.
Gujarat did so for all cities except Rajkot, and it was the same in Chhattisgarh, except for the city of Bilaspur. In Telangana, only two cities dropped in rankings this year, while it happened in four cities in Andhra Pradesh, Mr Naidu said.
The survey ranks 25 towns from Uttar Pradesh among the bottom 50 cities, followed by Rajasthan and Punjab, with five each, two in Maharashtra and one each from Haryana, Karnataka and Lakshadweep. Varanasi has, however, improved its ranking from 418 in 2014 to 32 this year, to become the “fastest big city mover” in the north zone.
The minister said Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Punjab and Kerala needed to substantially step up their efforts to improve sanitation standards in urban areas.
The survey was conducted by the Quality Council of India in January-February this year, and deployed 421 assessors for on-site inspection of cleanliness in 434 cities and towns and another 55 for real-time monitoring of progress of survey and field inspections.
