Parameters pertaining to waste water treatment & reuse & fecalsludge management given special focus in Swachh Survekshan League 2020 : Hardeep S Puri

Jun 06,2019

Shri Hardeep S Puri, Minister of State (I/C) for Housing & Urban Affairs has stated that in the Swachh Survekshan 2020(SS 2020) league, parameters pertaining to Wastewater treatment &reuse and fecal sludge management have been given special focus.  Launching the SS 2020 League here today , he  said that there will be  a quarterly cleanliness assessment of cities and towns in India.  This will be integrated with Swachh Survekshan 2020, the 5th edition of the annual cleanliness survey of urban India to be conducted from January – February 2020 by Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs under the aegis of Swachh Bharat Mission- Urban (SBM-U). Shri Durga Shanker Mishra, Secretary, MoHUA, Shri V.K.Jindal, Joint Secretary & Mission Director of SBM(U) besides senior officers of the Ministry were also present at the launch function.  The launch was also attended by the Principal Secretaries, State Mission Directors and Municipal Commissioners of 106 cities with population of 5 lakhs and above who joined the event through+ a video conference.

Speaking on the need for a quarterly evaluation mechanism, Shri Puri said, “Every year, the Swachh Survekshan is redesigned innovatively, to ensure that the process becomes more and more robust, with focus on sustaining the changed behaviours. However, one concern that was commonly voiced was that cities cleaned themselves up just before a survey and slipped down after that. This year, therefore, we are launching the ‘Continuous Survekshan’ – the SS 2020 League, where cleanliness assessments will happen throughout the year – similar to the continuous assessments that are followed in schools and colleges – and feed into the larger annual survey in January 2020”. SS League 2020 has been introduced with the objective of sustaining the onground performance of cities along with continuous monitoring of service level performance when it comes to cleanliness.

Elaborating on the process of conducting the exercise, Shri DurgaShanker Mishra, Secretary, MoHUA said, “SS League 2020 will be conducted in 3 quarters, i.e. April- June, July – September and October- December 2019 and will have a weightage of 2000 marks for each quarter to be evaluated on the basis of monthlyupdation of SBM-U online MIS by cities along with citizen’s validation on the 12 service level progress indicators through outbound calls. These two parameters will together determine the quarterly ranking of cities. Ranks will be assigned in two categories, namely, cities with population of one lakh and above and cities with population of less than 1 lakh. The performance of cities in SS League 2020 will be crucial to their ranking in Swachh Survekshan 2020 due to the 25% weightage of the quarterly assessments to be included in the annual survey in January 2020.” The exercise will cover all ULBs that have come into existence on or before 31 December 2018.

As a prelude to encouraging cities to improve urban sanitation, MoHUA had conducted ‘Swachh Survekshan-2016’ survey for the rating of 73 cities in January 2016, followed by ‘Swachh Survekshan-2017’ conducted in January-February 2017 ranking 434 cities. The third round of Swachh Survekshan in 2018 was a quantum leap of scale - conducted across 4,203 cities in 66 days, and became the largest ever Pan India Sanitation Survey in the world, impacting around 40 crore people. The 4th edition covered 4237 cities in a record time of 28 days and was a fully digitized paperless survey. While SS 2016 had seen Mysuru emerge as the cleanest city in India, Indore has retained the title of the Cleanest City in the last three years. Today, the Swachh Survekshan survey has evolved as a powerful and transparent Mission governance and implementation tool, while giving rise to a spirit of healthy competition among states and cities in their race towards becoming ‘Swachh’.

Informing about the achievements of SS 2019, the Minister stated that 84,000 informal waste pickers have been formally integrated into sustainable livelihoods, 4.6 lakh sanitary workers have been provided medical benefits and more than 1 crore citizens have participated in campaigns through Swachh Manch, 18,329 Garbage Vulnerable Points have been transformed and 345 landfill sites have been remediated.  More than 370 cities are practicing segregation at source in more than 80 % of their wards.

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RJ