President Droupadi Murmu felicitated the awardees at the award ceremony of Azadi@75 Swachh Survekshan 2022, hosted as part of Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban 2.0 by Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs (MoHUA) at Talkatora Stadium, New Delhi on 1 October. The President gave away the top 12 awards.
The award ceremony – organized to recognize the good work done for Swachhata by towns/ cities, states and union territories under Swachh Survekshan 2022 and certifications for Garbage Free Star rating for cities – saw more than 160 awards under various categories being given away through the day.
Hardeep S Puri, Union Minister of Housing & Urban Affairs and Kaushal Kishore, Minister of State for Housing & Urban Affairs also felicitated the awardee cities and States
Indore, the city of lakes and palaces, walked away with the Cleanest City title for the sixth consecutive year, in the ‘more than 1 lakh population’ category. Surat and Navi Mumbai were declared second and third cleanest cities.
In the population category of ‘less than 1 lakh’, Panchgani and Karad from Maharashtra bagged the first and third positions respectively, while Patan from Chhattisgarh bagged the second position.
Madhya Pradesh emerged as the ‘Cleanest State’ in the category of “more than 100 Urban Local Bodies”, relegating Chhattisgarh, the Cleanest State of the previous 3 years, to second place. Maharashtra emerged as third cleanest State.
In the “less than 100 ULBs category”, Tripura emerged as the Cleanest State award, dislodging Jharkhand, which had won in the last 2 consecutive years. Jharkhand and Uttarakhand received the second and third spots respectively.
The 2022 edition of Survekshan was participated by 4,355 cities and saw over nine crores of citizens’ feedback, compared to 5 crores last year.
In all, 22 states and five UTs received awards, of whom eight states received more than ten awards each. Eight States and five UTs have shown improvements ranging between 5 – 25% in their overall ground level performance over last year. Of them, four out the eight North Eastern states have shown significant improvement in the overall performance over the last year.
Indore further cemented its position by emerging as India’s first 7-star Garbage Free city, while Surat, Bhopal, Mysuru, Navi Mumbai, Vishakhapatnam, and Tirupati earned 5-star Garbage Free certifications.
The vision of a Garbage Free India under SBM-U 2.0 was given further impetus by announcing the results of 7-star and 5-star rated cities under the Star Rating Protocol of Garbage Free Cities. The revised Star Rating Protocol of Garbage Free Cities was launched in 2021 to holistically evaluate cities across solid waste management parameters.
This year, the number has gone up manifold with 3,600 cities applying for the assessment against 2,238 last year, and number of Star rated cities has gone up to 412 (with 11 five-star cities, 182 three-star cities, and 218 one-star cities), thus signifying how cities’ aspirations towards becoming Garbage Free is getting enhanced.
