On the lines of ratings of five star or seven star hotels, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) has decided to give star ratings to cities under Swachchh Bharat Mission (SBM).
The guidelines for star rating protocol for garbage-free cities would be launched by next week. This is the first time that star rating would be given to cities for making themselves free from garbage.
According to sources, one star would be given to the city which fairs worst on achieving garbage-free status. Five stars will go to the best performers. The star rating protocol would be different from the Swachchh Survekshan ranking survey. It will allow multiple cities to be awarded the same star rating.
In the Swachchh Survekshan held in 2016 and 2017, the ranking of cleanliness was given on the basis of feedback from the local bodies on construction of public toilets, community toilets, door-to-door garbage collections, lifting of garbage and processing and disposal of solid waste. In this Swachchh Survekshan, the rating would be given to city based on how they make themselves free from garbage or how they use technology to achieve this task. How municipal bodies dispose off garbage will also be one of criteria for ranking.
Sources said the first stage is crucial as the resident has to segregate the household garbage into wet and dry, and hand them over to the garbage collectors. While wet and dry garbage have to be placed in separate bins, other garbage such as plastic bottles, glass pieces has to be disposed off separately.
The sources further stated that as far as community toilets and public toilets are concerned, the users will also be asked to give feedback cleanliness using Google toilet locator and swachchhata app. Significantly, the toilet locator application will also have a feedback system to rate the toilet facilities at each location. This will enable the civic body to get an idea of the cleanliness standards of the public toilets online.
“As far as new guidelines are concerned, it would lay out the roles and responsibilities of bulk waste generators and will handhold urban local bodies in implementing the solid waste management rules while the online database will henceforth capture data directly from States and cities online, regarding their progress on SBM components, thereby enhancing the robustness and transparency of Mission monitoring,” officials said.
As per the Swachchh Survekshan 2017 report released early this year, Indore in Madhya Pradesh have been declared the cleanest city and Gonda in Uttar Pradesh ranked the dirtiest. Unlike in 2016 when the report assessed 73 cities, 434 cities have been assessed this year and ranked on the basis of cleanliness and sanitation.
Swachchh Survekshan was conducted between January 5, 2016 and January 20, 2016. Cities were given two months’ preparatory time from October 2015 to support the data collection activities carried out during the field visits. A team of 110 assessors was deployed on the ground to conduct the survey. The survey involved assessors visiting all the 73 cities and their UlBs to collect data from the ground level.