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Ahmedabad gets cleanest city status in Swachh Survekshan
The Swachh Survekshan Awards, organised under the Centre’s Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban, is publicised by the government as the world’s largest urban sanitation and cleanliness survey.
Ahmedabad, which was the 18th cleanest city last year across all categories, was declared the cleanest city in the million-plus cities (population of over one million) categoryin the Swachh Survekshan (Urban) 2024-25 Awards, even as past winners such as Indore were elevated to the new Super Swachh League (SSL) introduced this year.
President Droupadi Murmu presented the awards at an event organised by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) in the Capital on Thursday. The Swachh Survekshan Awards, organised under the Centre’s Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban, is publicised by the government as the world’s largest urban sanitation and cleanliness survey.
Ahmedabad was ranked 15th in the million-plus cities category in last year’s ranking. While Ahmedabad scored 12,079 points, Bhopal, Lucknow, Raipur, and Jabalpur were the next best-performing cities in the same population category with scores of 12,067,12,001,11,996,11,989, respectively, out of a total of 12,500.
Indore, which was the cleanest city in this category for the past seven consecutive years, has been elevated to a new category — the Super Swachh League (SSL) cities — introduced this year. The league features cities that have ranked in the top three at least once in the last three years and remain in the top 20% of their respective population category in the current year. The details of the ranking among these SSL cities have not been declared.
Other than Indore, the league includes Surat (last year’s joint topper), Navi Mumbai (second in last year’s ranking), and Vijayawada –– another consistent top performer in the million-plus population category.
This year, among the changes, the absolute ranking system has been discontinued by MoHUA.
Megacities lag behind
Among the megacities, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi bagged the 31st rank with a score of 7,920, Mumbai managed to secure the 33rd rank with a score of 7,419, while Bengaluru and Chennai fared worse at 36 and 38 with 6,842 points and 6,822 points, respectively. Hyderabad (11,805 points), Pimpri Chinchwad (11,782 points), and Pune (11,653 points) fared better with the sixth, seventh, and eighth positions.
Speaking at the event, Union minister for power, housing and urban affairs Manohar Lal Khattar said to improve the condition of big cities and remediate dump sites, the Centre will come up with an accelerated dumpsite remediation programme. “This one-year special program starting from August15, 2025, will not only help fast-track legacy waste remediation and unlock massive urban space, but will also push the scientific waste processing capacity,” he said.
Khattar said states will be incentivised for increasing their waste management capacities. Further, he announced the launch of the Swachh City Partnership initiative, where 78 top-performing cities will mentor one poor-performing city each from their respective states, following the principle of “each one, teach one”.
Meanwhile, Kolkata was not ranked among the top 40 cities in its category and its report card was not available on the dashboard. It may be recalled that the previous time — -three of the lowest-ranked cities in the million-plus population category were in West Bengal: Haora (Howrah) at the bottom, with Asansol and Kolkata.
West Bengal only had a single mention this year with Baidyabati, a municipality in Hooghly district, named as a promising city. However, report cards from the state were unavailable. Tripura was another state with no details available on the dashboard. MoHUA officials were unavailable for comment.
Like Indore and Surat, Chandigarh, Noida, Ujjain, Gandhinagar, Guntur and Mysuru have been made part of the SSL under the 300,000-1 million population category. Similarly, in the 50,000-300,000 population category, New Delhi Municipal Council, Ambikapur, Lonavla, and Tirupati were also selected for the league.
Doorstep segregation, AI works for Indore, Surat
Segregation of waste at source is the secret to Indore’s sustained success, said Syad Javed Ali Warsi, waste management advisor consultant with the Indore Municipal Corporation. This was only possible with the change in behaviour of citizens, which was affected due to a sustained campaign by municipal officials, he added.
“Citizen participation is the only reason why there is a high rate of segregation at source, which makes all aspects of reuse, recycling, extraction of energy, and wealth efficient at the processing plants.”
He added that the city has adopted a balanced approach of centralised and decentralised plants depending on settlement patterns. Another sign of successful behaviour change at the citizen level is that around 70,000 households practice home composting.
Apart from this, constant monitoring at a daily level at multiple levels of door-to-door collection, processing plants, and street littering has also been significant in ensuring service levels remain consistent. “Residents can also flag issues missed by officials through the official app,” Warsi said.
He said these concerted efforts have resulted in the city’s civic body earning ₹2.5 crore annually from wet waste processing plants and ₹1.5 crore from dry waste plants. Further, the smart city special purpose vehicle (SPV) in Indore was the first South Asian city to sell carbon credits through its biogas plant.
Surat Municipal Corporation commissioner Shalini Agrawal said the city’s place in the SSL was due to the continued efforts in improving solid waste management in the city. She said the city has worked in improving waste segregation levels at the household level and followed a 5R (Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recover, and Recycle) approach with the help of women-led self-help groups and organising campaigns in schools, workplaces and community spaces. As part of legacy waste remediation exercises, she said, 60 hectares of land has been recovered and turned into a biodiversity park along the Kankara Creek.
Agrawal said, recently, Surat has started using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for waste management by detecting stray cattle and littering through the live feed from CCTV cameras in the city. “As soon as littering or stray cattle appears in the camera feeds, an automatic alert is generated,” she said. “We are in the process of establishing one of India’s most cutting-edge solid waste management plants in Surat.”
