Indore was adjudged India’s cleanest city for the fourth time in a row while Kolkata was the worst performer in the central government’s cleanliness survey announced on December 31.

In the category of cities having population more than 10 lakh, Bhopal stood second in first quarter results (April to June), while Rajkot grabbed the second spot in second quarter results (July-September) of ‘Swachh Survekshan League 2020’. 

The third position was grabbed by Surat in the first quarter and Navi Mumbai in the second quarter. According to the survey, Kolkata grabbed lowest position in cleanliness in the category of cities having population more than 10 lakh in the second quarter.

Among cantonment boards, Delhi Cantt stood first while the second and third positions were grabbed by Jhansi Cantt board and Jalandhar Cantt Board respectively in the second quarter. Secunderabad Cantonment Board in Hyderabad was the worst performer among other cantonment boards.

What is SS League 2020?

Swachh Survekshan League 2020 is a quarterly cleanliness assessment of cities and towns in India and is integrated with Swachh Survekshan 2020, conducted under the aegis of Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (SBM-U).

SS League 2020 was introduced with the objective of sustaining the onground performance of cities along with continuous monitoring of service level performance when it comes to cleanliness.

The primary goal of all Swachh Survekshan is to encourage large scale citizen participation and create awareness amongst all sections of society about the importance of working together towards making towns and cities a better place to live in. 

Additionally, these surveys also intend to foster a spirit of healthy competition among towns and cities to improve their service delivery to citizens, and thus steadily moving towards creating cleaner cities. 

SS League 2020 is being conducted in 3 quarters, April-June, July–September and October-December 2019 and has 2000 marks for each quarter.  

Ranks have been assigned in two categories, namely, cities with population of one lakh and above (with two sub-categories — 1-10 lakh and 10 lakh and above) and cities with population of less than 1 lakh. 

The performance of cities in SS League 2020 is crucial to their ranking in Swachh Survekshan 2020 due to the 25 per cent weightage of the quarterly assessments to be included in the annual survey scheduled to commence from January 4 to January 31, 2020.

Fifth edition of Swachh Survekshan

The ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA) had conducted ‘Swachh Survekshan-2016’ survey for the rating of 73 cities in January 2016, followed by ‘Swachh Survekshan-2017’ conducted in January-February 2017 ranking 434 cities. 

The third round of Swachh Survekshan in 2018 was a quantum leap of scale. It was conducted across 4,203 cities in 66 days, and became the largest ever pan India sanitation survey in the world, impacting around 40 crore people. 

The fourth edition covered 4,237 cities in a record time of 28 days and was a fully digitized paperless survey.

While SS 2016 had seen Mysuru emerge as the cleanest city in India, Indore has retained the title of the cleanest city in the last three years. 

SS 2020 will see cities across India being surveyed. With the spirit of competition running high among cities, it remains to be seen who will wear the Swachhata crown this time.

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