Spotless record: How 4 states came to dominate cleanest cities rankings

Latest clean city survey tracked 4,242 urban local bodies and 62 cantonment boards.

Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh have dominated India’s Ten Cleanest cities survey in the last five years, after the Swachh Bharat Mission began. The Mission is a modified version of the erstwhile Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan. 

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Indore, one of the biggest cities in Madhya Pradesh, took the top spot in 2020 for the fourth consecutive year. Surat in Gujarat and Navi Mumbai in Maharashtra are frequent toppers in the list and came second and third this year.  

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Municipal services, such as collection, disposal and transportation of waste, communication and capacity building, were used as benchmarks in the survey and assigned different weights. The weight matrix was improved to include “innovation” in the 2020 survey. 

But service level progress comprised only a quarter of the total score. Remaining three quarters were assigned to “Direct Observation,” “Citizen Feedback,” and “Certification.” Each quarter had 1500 points associated with it, totalling the maximum score to 6000 points. 

The certification part included the degree to which a city was garbage and open defecation free. It is this part where even the cleanest cities in India failed to show good results. 

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For example, Andhra Pradesh’s capital Vijayawada, the fourth cleanest city in India according to the rankings, scored 1,100 on 1,500 in being garbage and open defecation free: indicating that open defecation is still practiced in parts of the country. 

Similarly, Nashik, a pilgrimage town in Maharashtra which was ranked 11 among the 47 cities with more than a million population, scored less than 50 per cent on this front. 

Cities fared the best on the “direct observation” count. The area where Indore overtook others is the “service level progress,” which consists of effective solid waste management practices such as door-to-door collection and household segregation of waste. 

Indore, the topper, scored 5,648 points on the scale, and Vadodara, which stood tenth, bagged 4870 points. The survey was carried out in 4,242 urban local bodies and 62 cantonment boards in the country.