Vizag is cleanest city, Puri bags crown among coastal towns

Why in the News

For the first time, the Swachh Survekshan awards carry separate categories for the cleanest riverfront town, coastal town and Himalayan city. A new “Swachh Sheher Jodi” award pairs each State’s best city with its worst. At the 10th edition, organised under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Visakhapatnam was named the cleanest city with over 10 lakh people and Puri the cleanest coastal town.

What is Swachh Survekshan, and how are cities grouped?

1. What it is: Swachh Survekshan is the annual cleanliness survey of cities under Swachh Bharat Mission Urban. It works like a yearly report card on urban sanitation, hygiene and waste management.
2. Population categories: Cities compete within population groups, so a small town is not ranked against a metropolis.
3. Super Swachh League: Winners of previous years are judged in this separate category.
4. Presentation: The President of India presented the awards in New Delhi.
5. The takeaway: Judging past winners separately lets new cities top the population categories.

Which cities won in the main categories?

1. Super Swachh League: Navi Mumbai came first, followed by Surat and Vijayawada.
2. Above 10 lakh population: Visakhapatnam was the cleanest city, followed by Jabalpur and Lucknow.
3. 3 lakh to 10 lakh: Ujjain came first, followed by Chandigarh and Guntur.
4. 50,000 to 3 lakh: Dewas came first, followed by the New Delhi Municipal Council and Sagar.
5. Indore: The city was ranked the cleanest for eight consecutive years. It topped the league last year, ahead of Surat and Navi Mumbai.

What new categories were added this year?

1. Cleanest riverfront town: Rewa in Madhya Pradesh, followed by Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh and Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh.
2. Cleanest coastal town: Puri in Odisha, followed by Alappuzha in Kerala and Ratnagiri in Maharashtra.
3. Cleanest Himalayan city: Rudrapur in Uttarakhand, followed by Jammu and Shopian.
4. Swachh Sheher Jodi: The best performing city of each State mentors its worst performing one. Ahmedabad and Sanand were the best mentor and mentee pair.
5. Other Jodi winners: Indore and its partner town Depalpur came second. Tirupati and Kuppam came third.

How has the survey grown?

1. Coverage: The survey has expanded from 73 cities in its first year, 2016, to 4,751 cities in 2025-26.
2. Citizen feedback: This edition gave citizen feedback greater emphasis and drew responses from 2.7 crore citizens.
3. Movement in ranks: Around 1,700 cities improved their ranking, about one in five of them by over 500 positions.
4. State level recognition: Jaipur was recognised as the cleanest city in Rajasthan and Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh.
5. President’s message: The President stressed participation by all stakeholders and a sense of cleanliness among children from an early age.

Challenges

1. Rank is relative: A rank shows a city’s position within its category, not whether all its waste is processed.
2. Laggard cities: The mentor and mentee category exists because the worst performing cities in each State trail far behind the best.
3. Citizen behaviour: Cleanliness depends on the daily habits of residents, which a yearly survey cannot enforce.

Way Forward

1. School curricula: Schools should teach topics such as plastic waste management, as the President suggested.
2. Targets for city pairs: States should set measurable sanitation targets for each mentor and mentee pair.
3. Scores with ranks: MoHUA should publish each city’s scores with its rank, so that cities see what to fix.

Conclusion

The survey now ranks cities across many more categories, and past winners compete apart. How the mentored towns move in the next edition will show whether pairing lifts the weakest cities.

Back2Basics: Swachh Survekshan

1. Assessor: The Quality Council of India carries out the assessment for MoHUA.
2. Scoring domains: The 2024 edition scored cities on three domains: service level progress, certification and citizen voice.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2026, GS3, 15 marks] What are the challenges to solid waste management in India? Discuss the governmental policy framework on solid waste management. Discuss the success/failure cases of Delhi and Indore cities highlighting the salient feature of their solid waste management initiatives.”