These cities must demonstrate “sustained, high-performance parameters of visible cleanliness”, tracked through key performance indicators or KPIs, a digital review and meetings chaired by a Union minister every other month. The push is welcome, and it aims to turn a decade of building and campaigning under the Swachh Bharat Mission into everyday practice — something cities can sustain only with capacities and institutions of their own.
When the Swachh Bharat Mission began on Gandhi Jayanti in 2014, Indian cities processed 16 per cent of their waste. By the time of the national review in May this year, that share had risen to 81 per cent, door-to-door collection had reached 97 per cent of wards, and 65 per cent of the waste in old dumpsites had been cleared. Much of this progress, like the toilets that made urban India open-defecation-free, came from what could be sanctioned, built and counted. It was carried along by a campaign that made swachhata a matter of civic pride and turned the Swachh Survekshan into a contest cities took seriously.
The Solid Waste Management Rules, 2026, in force since April, show how many hands a clean city passes through. Households are to segregate waste into four categories and bulk generators are to process their own wet waste where they can. Municipalities collect and transport it; state pollution control boards levy penalties; district collectors oversee landfills; the Central Pollution Control Board runs a national portal; and a committee chaired by each state’s chief secretary is to steer implementation. These rules assume a level of coordination that India’s waste governance has historically found difficult to sustain, and that enforcement falls mainly on generators, with no equivalent mechanism when a city lacks the vehicles, staff or plants to keep segregated waste apart.
Used water passes through more hands still, with sewerage in larger cities falling under the AMRUT scheme and in towns with fewer than 100,000 people under the Swachh Bharat Mission, which, since 2021, has aimed to keep untreated wastewater out of water bodies. In many states, the pipes and plants belong to water boards that answer to state governments rather than city governments.
The Comptroller and Auditor General’s audits of 393 urban local bodies in 18 states found that cities fully controlled only four of the 18 functions the 74th Amendment assigns them, with parastatals running five on average. They also found 37 per cent of sanctioned municipal posts vacant and local bodies in 16 states with limited or no power to recruit. Municipal revenues have hovered around 1 per cent of gross domestic product for over a decade, a 2024 paper for the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister noted. Grants can build a plant, but running it needs recurring revenue, and a 2025 study of three leading cities found no state charging cost-covering user fees and most residents unwilling to pay.
The mission’s guidelines for its second phase acknowledged in 2021 that the first had brought to light “qualitative and quantitative shortfalls in the capacities of the key personnel” and called for “a cadre of professionals” in cities and states. The capacity-building framework that followed delivers support through programme units, contractual city managers and two-month internships, and measures progress by the number of training sessions held. Sensibly, it also made the integration of informal workers, including those who clean sewers and septic tanks, a condition for the release of funds. The new rules, however, still offer little guidance on integrating waste pickers, who risk being displaced as segregation tightens and systems are mechanised.
The 50 cities for PRAGATI initiative include major cities, cultural and tourist centres, and economic hubs, chosen to serve as role models for the rest of the country. The towns expected to follow are smaller, and the 2025 study linked better results to the greater capacity of larger cities, observing that in a smaller city improvements can be prompt but short-lived. Financing the clean-up of legacy dumpsites will remain hard for towns with limited fiscal capacity.
The task ahead is to enhance recruitment powers, ensure timely fiscal transfers, establish clear accountability for sewerage, and enable regional bodies to plan shared facilities for small-town clusters. Once cities are equipped with supportive institutions, fiscal space and technical capacity, fair monitoring of outcomes can track institutional measures alongside visible ones, such as vacancies filled, running costs recovered through user charges, and sewage treatment capacity actually used, as verified through household surveys. Each model city could mentor smaller towns so that capability spreads alongside results.
Change of this kind tends to arrive in two movements. Swachh Bharat’s first decade created awareness and added numbers, in toilets built, wards covered and waste processed, and it did so at remarkable speed. The movement now required is slower, turning new habits into settled practice, and it depends on cities with the people, money and authority to sustain them after the campaign has passed. That is capacity-building in its fullest sense, and PRAGATI-50 can be where it begins.
The writer is chair, Institute for Competitiveness. With inputs from Meenakshi Ajith. @kautiliya
 "Indore | Image : sbmurban.org")