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2023 Swachh Survekshan: Chandigarh’s upward climb continues, ranks 11th
Improves score from 82.7% in 2022 to 89.9% in 2023; also bags award for the best ‘Safaimitra Surakshit Shehar’
Improving from last year’s performance by one position, Chandigarh has been adjudged as the 11th most cleanest city among those with population exceeding 1 lakh in the 2023 Swachh Survekshan rankings that were declared on Thursday.
Last year, the city had attained the 12th rank in the same category.
Chandigarh also bagged the award for the best “Safaimitra Surakshit Shehar” in the country, reflecting its attention to safety standards for sanitation workers.
With an 8,541 out of 9,500 score, Chandigarh scored 89.9% marks, up from 82.7% in 2022 (6209 out of 7500). The City Beautiful achieved the maximum marks in the citizen voice category (2045 out of 2170), followed by service level progress (4645 out of 4830) and certification (1850 out of 2500).
Indore and Surat were jointly declared as the cleanest cities of India, with 9348 out of 9500 marks. This was the seventh time that Indore won the coveted title of the cleanest city in India. With a score of 9240, Navi Mumbai got the third position.
In a first, the Union ministry of housing and urban affairs also shared a report card for each city in which Chandigarh scored a sparkling 100% in five categories — waste segregation vs processing, cleanliness of markets, residential areas, water bodies and public toilets.
The city also secured 99% in door-to-door garbage collection, 97% in segregation of waste at source, but only 67% in remediation of dumpsites, primarily due to the legacy waste lying dumped at the Dadumajra landfill in the city.
As per the Chandigarh municipal corporation (MC) officials, over 80% of the legacy waste had been biomined as of December 2023, while the complete remediation of 13 lakh metric tonnes (MT) legacy waste is expected to be completed by February this year, which will further improve the city’s scores next year.
However, Chandigarh got only three out of seven stars in the Garbage Free Cities (GFC) certification, one of the reasons for the city not making it to the top five.
Municipal commissioner Anindita Mitra said, “Over the past year, we worked hard as a city to improve segregation of waste, achieve 100% processing of waste and to complete bioremediation of legacy waste. The result indicates our dedication and work. Since we will biomine the entire legacy waste this year, we shall certainly achieve zero dumpsite and 100% processing in the next rankings. With this, Chandigarh will be eligible for the seven-star certification and we will certainly be in the top three positions.”
City mayor Anup Gupta, too, expressed confidence in reaching the top three next year with 100% bio-remediation of legacy waste by February this year.
Swachh Survekshan, conducted by the Union ministry of housing and urban affairs (under the Swachh Bharat Urban Mission since 2016, is the world’s largest urban sanitation and cleanliness survey, in which cities are ranked on the basis of various parameters, including segregated door-to-door waste collection, zero waste events, disabled-friendly toilets and improved plastic waste management.
This year, in the eighth edition of the survey, a total of 3,000 assessors conducted the assessment of more than 4,500 cities across 46 indicators.
In 2016, Chandigarh was ranked second best among 73 cities. In the 2017 rankings, the city stood 11th among 434 cities and in 2018, it was third among 4,203 cities. In 2019, Chandigarh’s national ranking dropped to 20 but again improved with 8th rank in 2020.
The city’s ranking slipped to 16th in 2021, but in 2022, the city performed better as it bagged the 12th rank.
