Navi Mumbai named India’s ‘cleanest city’; Surat, Vijayawada runners-up

The 10th edition of the survey assessed over 4,700 cities on 43 indicators, with more than 27 million citizens participating in the evaluation.

Navi Mumbai emerged as India’s cleanest city, followed by Surat and Vijayawada, in the National Clean City category of the Centre’s Swachh Survekshan Awards 2025-26 announced on Wednesday.

The 10th edition of the survey assessed over 4,700 cities on 43 indicators, with more than 27 million citizens participating in the evaluation. (@rashtrapatibhvn X/ANI Photo)

President Droupadi Murmu conferred the awards, the survey’s 10th edition, at a ceremony at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi.

Indore, which topped every edition from 2017 to 2023, the last jointly with Surat, according to the housing and urban affairs ministry’s toolkit for the survey, moved into the Super Swachh League in 2024-25 and was not in the main rankings. This year it was assessed as a mentor city under the Swachh Shehar Jodi (mentor-mentee city) initiative.

Super Swachh League cities assessed separately under additional indicators

Under the survey’s rules, the league is made up of cities that finished in the top three of their population category in at least three of the 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 editions. According to the toolkit, league cities are assessed on additional indicators and are not ranked against one another, and they must score at least 85% to stay in.

Ahmedabad, which won the 2024-25 survey, topped the Jodi category, which is new this year, with its partner Sanand. Indore and Depalpur came second, and Tirupati and Kuppam third. Under the initiative, 70 mentor cities have been paired with 191 mentee cities to facilitate knowledge-sharing and improve sanitation services. The Jodi awards are based on the combined scores of the mentor city, which was a Swachh Survekshan 2024-25 awardee, and its paired mentee city.

Syad Javed Ali Warsi, an Indore-based solid waste management consultant and former adviser to the Swachh Bharat Mission, said Indore had provided technical, operational and on-ground support to Depalpur, including treating its legacy waste and introducing the four-bin waste segregation system and waste processing. An Indore Municipal Corporation team had also provided in-person assistance to improve the town’s waste management systems, he said.

“It was an overall transformation of the town,” Warsi said. Depalpur, he said, had been ranked somewhere between 500 and 600 last year.

Swachh Survekshan Awards (HT GFX)

Survey evaluates over 4,700 cities across 43 cleanliness indicators

The survey evaluated more than 4,700 cities across 43 indicators covering 10 critical areas, including waste segregation, collection and transportation, solid waste management, visible cleanliness, access to sanitation, used water management and sanitation workers’ welfare. Cities were scored out of 12,500 marks: 10,500 for the on-ground assessment including citizen feedback, and 2,000 for open defecation-free and garbage-free certification. More than 3,000 trained assessors conducted on-ground evaluations using real-time GPS-enabled monitoring and a fully digital verification process.

Swati Singh Sambyal, principal expert at GRID-Arendal, said, “It is encouraging to see new cities claim the top spots in the Swachh Survekshan 2025-26 results. Interestingly, the top three performers all rely heavily on centralized waste management models built around source segregation, strict tracking, and large-scale processing. While their success is commendable, it raises a critical question for urban policymakers: Are these rankings inadvertently signaling a move away from decentralized waste systems?”

Waste processing carries 15% of the on-ground marks, and segregation, collection and transport 10%, according to the toolkit.

Visakhapatnam leads among cities with over one million residents

In the population-based categories, Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation topped the rankings among cities with more than a million residents, followed by Jabalpur and Lucknow. Ujjain was the cleanest city in the 3-10 lakh category, with Chandigarh and Guntur second and third. Dewas topped the 50,000-300,000 category, followed by New Delhi Municipal Council and Sagar. In the 20,000-50,000 category, Maharashtra’s Vita came first, followed by Aska and Panaji. Bilha topped the category of cities with fewer than 20,000 residents, ahead of Panchgani and Budni.

The awards also included three specialised categories. Madhya Pradesh’s Rewa topped the Swachh River Front Town category, followed by Chhattisgarh’s Bilaspur and Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi. Odisha’s Puri was the cleanest coastal town, followed by Alappuzha in Kerala and Ratnagiri in Maharashtra. Uttarakhand’s Rudrapur topped the Clean Himalayan City category, with Jammu and Shopian, both in Jammu and Kashmir, second and third. According to the toolkit, coastal towns are assessed on a separate matrix for the first time this year, and the river town category expands an earlier one for Ganga towns. The Himalayan category is also new.

Thirty cities receive State First Swachh City awards

The awards also recognised the top-ranked cities in states and Union territories. Thirty cities received State First Swachh City awards, with separate categories for Union territories based on the number of urban local bodies. They included Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh, Guwahati in Assam, Patna in Bihar, Bhubaneswar in Odisha, Jaipur in Rajasthan, Mysore in Karnataka, Greater Hyderabad in Telangana and Tarakeswar in West Bengal.

Smaller urban centres improved across the board. More than 1,700 urban local bodies with populations below 50,000 rose in the rankings compared with 2024-25, and more than 350 climbed over 500 places. Some 27 million citizens gave feedback during this year’s assessment.

Union housing and urban affairs minister Manohar Lal, who attended the ceremony with minister of state Tokhan Sahu, said urban waste processing had risen from 16% in 2014 to 80%, and door-to-door collection coverage from 44% to more than 96%. Remediation of legacy dumpsites had freed nearly 11,000 acres of urban land for productive use, he said.

The minister highlighted the government’s PRAGATI-50 initiative to develop 50 cities as model clean cities through technology-driven interventions and continuous monitoring. He also urged states to run their own cleanliness rankings to encourage competition among urban local bodies, particularly smaller towns. The ministry is expected to release detailed rankings and assessment parameters in the coming days, including the position of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. State-level award ceremonies will also be held.

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