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Indore still on top in cleanliness survey, let score sheet be released, says mayor
Pushyamitra Bhargava claims the city secured the highest marks in the National Clean City category, despite not figuring among the top three winners.
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Indore mayor Pushyamitra Bhargava has maintained that the city remains at the top of India's cleanliness rankings, challenging critics to wait for the detailed scorecard of the Centre's Swachh Survekshan Awards 2025-26.
Speaking to news agency Press Trust of India (PTI), Bhargava claimed that Indore had secured the highest marks in the National Clean City category, despite not figuring among the top three winners announced on Wednesday.
"Those who are saying that Indore has lost its top position in the national cleanliness survey should tell us what our position is. Let the score sheet be released, everything will become clear," the mayor said.
He said Indore was awarded second position in the newly introduced 'Swachh Shehar Jodi' category along with its partner town Depalpur because of the Centre's 'one city, one award' policy.
Navi Mumbai emerged as India's cleanest city in the National Clean City category, followed by Surat and Vijayawada. President Droupadi Murmu conferred the awards, marking the 10th edition of the survey, at a ceremony at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi.
Indore had topped every edition from 2017 to 2023, the last jointly with Surat. It moved into the Super Swachh League in 2024-25 and was not included in the main rankings. This year, it was assessed as a mentor city under the Swachh Shehar Jodi initiative.
Under the survey's rules, the Super Swachh League comprises cities that finished among the top three in their population categories in at least three of the 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 editions. League cities are assessed on additional indicators rather than ranked against one another and must score at least 85% to retain their position.
Indore's performance in Swachh Shehar Jodi category
Ahmedabad, which won the 2024-25 survey, topped the newly introduced Swachh Shehar Jodi category with its partner town Sanand. Indore and Depalpur finished second, while Tirupati and Kuppam secured the third position.
Under the initiative, 70 mentor cities have been paired with 191 mentee cities to facilitate knowledge-sharing and improve sanitation services. The awards are based on the combined scores of the mentor city, which was a Swachh Survekshan 2024-25 awardee, and its paired mentee city.
Syed 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. This included treating its legacy waste, introducing a four-bin waste segregation system and improving waste processing.
An Indore Municipal Corporation team also provided in-person assistance to strengthen the town's waste management systems.
"It was an overall transformation of the town," Warsi said, adding that Depalpur had been ranked somewhere between 500 and 600 last year.
How cities were assessed
The 2025-26 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, with 10,500 allocated to on-ground assessments, including citizen feedback, and 2,000 to open defecation-free and garbage-free certification. More than 3,000 trained assessors conducted on-ground evaluations using real-time GPS-enabled monitoring and digital verification.
According to the survey toolkit, waste processing accounts for 15% of the on-ground marks, while segregation, collection and transportation account for 10%.
Swati Singh Sambyal, principal expert at GRID-Arendal, said it was encouraging to see new cities claim the top spots in this year's results. However, she flagged the growing reliance on centralised waste management models.
The top three performers, she said, relied heavily on centralised systems built around source segregation, strict tracking and large-scale processing. This, she said, raised questions about whether the rankings were signalling a shift away from decentralised waste management systems.
Other winners in Swachh Survekshan 2025-26
In the population-based categories, Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation topped the rankings among cities with more than one million residents, followed by Jabalpur and Lucknow.
Ujjain emerged as the cleanest city in the 3-10 lakh population category, with Chandigarh and Guntur finishing second and third. Dewas topped the 50,000-3 lakh category, followed by New Delhi Municipal Council and Sagar.
In the 20,000-50,000 category, Maharashtra's Vita secured the first position, 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 recognised 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 named the cleanest coastal town, ahead of Alappuzha and Ratnagiri. Uttarakhand's Rudrapur topped the Clean Himalayan City category, followed by Jammu and Shopian.
The survey also recognised 30 cities with State First Swachh City awards. These 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.
More than 1,700 urban local bodies with populations below 50,000 improved their rankings compared with 2024-25, while more than 350 climbed over 500 places. Around 27 million citizens participated in the assessment.
Union housing and urban affairs minister Manohar Lal, who attended the ceremony with minister of state Tokhan Sahu, said urban waste processing had increased from 16% in 2014 to 80%, while door-to-door collection coverage had risen from 44% to more than 96%.
He also highlighted the government's PRAGATI-50 initiative to develop 50 cities as model clean cities through technology-driven interventions and continuous monitoring. The ministry is expected to release detailed rankings and assessment parameters in the coming days, including the position of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi.
