New Delhi, Jan 9: The Union Ministry of Urban Development has commissioned an extensive survey to study the progress of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat Mission so far and to rank 75 cities on sanitation and cleanliness.
The survey, the first for the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), will be conducted by the Quality Council of India (QCI) and has been aptly named as Swachh Sarvekshan. It will cover all state capitals and another 53 cities with a population of above one million.
It will involve three streams of data collection, including citizen feedback, as detailed further down.
A base-year pre survey was conducted across 476 cities last year before the launch of the SBM.
In the current survey, findings as on December 2015 will be tallied with the findings as on October 2014 to measure the progress made by each of these 75 cities and rank them accordingly.
Swachh Sarvekshan is being conducted between 5 January and 20 January. The results are expected to be announced on 25 January 2016 on the MyGov website.
One of the stated objectives of SBM is to ensure door-to-door garbage collection and proper disposal of municipal solid waste in all the 83,000 wards in urban areas by 2019. Hence, to plot the progress of the mission on this parameter, Swachh Sarvekshan will evaluate the work done in the following six measurable aspects of sanitation and hygiene such as strategy for Open Defecation Free town (ODF) and Integrated Solid Waste Management (SWM), information, Education and Behaviour Change Communication (IEBC) activity, sweeping, door to door collection and transportation (of solid waste), processing and disposal (of solid waste), provision of public & community toilet seats and construction of household individual toilets.
Mission Director (SBM) Praveen Prakash said, “Swachh Sarvekshan is the very first survey commissioned by the Ministry of Urban Development since the launch of Swachh Bharat Mission in October 2014. The ministry wants data from the ground to measure the impact of the mission year-on-year.”
“We are acutely aware that the quality of the survey is critical, because the reputation of cities will be built on this. Hence the assessors were put through professionally designed training sessions to ensure quality and transparency of the evaluation process and thus the credibility of Swachh Sarvekshan itself.”
Elaborating on the same, Adil Zainulbhai, chairman, QCI said, “Swachh Sarvekshan will help us assess the level of cleanliness in 75 cities and simultaneously foster a spirit of healthy competition between the cities. The success of Swachh Sarvekshan is dependent on the involvement of the municipalities and citizens of the 75 cities. QCI invites the involvement of citizens and municipalities to make this survey a success.”
The data to be collected for ranking of the cities will be segregated into three main areas:
