In a move to encourage large-scale citizen participation, ensure sustainability of initiatives taken towards garbage free and open defecation free cities, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (HUA) on Friday launched the ‘Swachchh Survekshan (Cleanliness survey) 2019’, the fourth edition of the annual nationwide cleanliness survey of urban India. The survey will cover 40 crore people across over 4,237 towns and cities between January 4 andJanuary 28.
To make the data more authentic, inspection will be conducted without giving any prior information to the concerned official for real-time check and survey will be based on people’s feedback by an independent third party. In the last three years, Mysuru and Indore had been ranked as the “No. 1” city in Swachchh Survekshan 2016, 2017 and 2018 respectively. The Swachchh Bharat Mission (SBM) is one of the flagship programme of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Launching the survey, Union HUA Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said that people may contribute to their city’s Swachchhata scores by segregating their waste at source, adopting home composting and coming up with innovative solutions for waste management and creating short videos and jingles to support their respective Urban Local Bodies in Swachchh Survekshan 2019.
The cleanliness survey aims to evaluate the achievements in the cleanliness level in urban areas of the country. Expected to be larger than the previous cleanliness surveys, survey 2019, completely digital and paperless survey, will be completed in a record time of 28 days.
Puri claimed that 83 percent of wards in the country are covered by door-to-door collection while 53 per cent wards are practicing source segregation and 46 per cent of the waste generated is now being scientifically processed.
“If claims of a city Government about any parameter are found to be incorrect by independent assessors, it will get zero marks for that parameters. Also, it will attract 33 per cent negative marking on the total obtained marks,” said officials.