Navi Mumbai, Surat & Vijayawada bag top Swachh Survekshan awards

• President Droupadi Murmu presented the Swachh Survekshan 2025-26 Awards at an event in New Delhi on November 11.

• Navi Mumbai secured the top award for the cleanest city in India.

• It was followed by Surat and Vijayawada in the central government’s annual cleanliness survey.

• Madhya Pradesh’s Rewa was declared the cleanest riverfront town and Uttarakhand’s Rudrapur emerged as the cleanest Himalayan city.

What is Swachh Survekshan?

• Swachh Survekshan is an annual survey of cleanliness, hygiene and sanitation in cities and towns across India. It was launched as part of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.

• The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) first conducted the Swachh Survekshan survey in 2016 for the rating of 73 cities.

• Swachh Survekshan has been instrumental in fostering a spirit of healthy competition among towns and cities to improve their service delivery to citizens and towards creating cleaner cities.

• Swachh Survekshan 2025-26 marks the 10th edition of the urban cleanliness survey. 

• More than 3,000 trained assessors conducted extensive on-ground evaluations across the country, supported by real-time GPS-enabled monitoring. 

• From evidence submission to verification, the assessment process remained fully digital, transparent, and subject to rigorous quality checks at every stage.

What is new in this edition?

• The theme of this edition was ‘Swachhata Ki Nayi Pehel - Badhayein Haath, Karein Safai Saath’.

• The assessment has grown in scale from 73 Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) in 2016 to over 4,751 cities in its latest edition.

• Alongside the top Swachh cities, this year’s awards also recognise top performers from the ‘Swachh Shehar Jodi’ initiative that has fostered peer learning between 70 mentor cities and 191 mentee cities across 33 states/UTs to accelerate urban waste management excellence. 

• The initiative was launched as the first-ever urban waste management mentorship and peer-learning programme. 

• This year 60 national awards have been announced, under five categories:

• Swachh Shehar Jodi (SSJ)

• Clean Cities of Super Swachh League

• Swachh Shehar in five population categories

• Swachh River Front Town

• Swachh Coastal Town

• Clean Himalayan City

• State First Swachh City.

Results of Swachh Survekshan 2025-26 Survey

• Maharashtra’s Navi Mumbai, Gujarat’s Surat and Andhra Pradesh’s Vijayawada emerged as top three Clean Cities of Super Swachh League.

• Mentor city Ahmedabad & Mentee city Sanand, Mentor Indore & Mentee Depalpur and Mentor Tirupati & Mentee Kuppam, were declared the top-ranked jodis under Swachh Shehar Jodi award.

• Rudrapur in Uttarakhand, Jammu & Shopian in J&K have been declared as the top three Clean Himalayan Cities. 

• The top three ranks for the Swachh River Front Town have been bestowed upon Rewa (Madhya Pradesh), Bilaspur (Chhattisgarh) & Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh).

• Awards for Swachh Coastal Town went to Odisha’s Puri, Kerala’s Alappuzha and Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri.

• GVMC Visakhapatnam, Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh) and Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh) emerged as India’s top Swachh Shehar in the million plus population category.

• Among cities with a population of 3-10 lakh, Madhya Pradesh’s Ujjain topped the rankings, with Chandigarh and Andhra Pradesh’s Guntur securing the second and third positions, respectively.

• In the 50,000-3 lakh population category, Madhya Pradesh’s Dewas and Sagar emerged as the cleanest, followed by the New Delhi Municipal Council and Madhya Pradesh’s Sagar.

• In the 20,000-50,000 population category, Vita from Maharashtra ranked first. Aska in Odisha and Goa’s Panaji secured the second and third positions, respectively.

• Chhattisgarh’s Bilha topped the category of cities with fewer than 20,000 residents, followed by  Panchgani in Maharashtra and Budni in Madhya Pradesh.