While launching the Swachh Survekshan 2020 (SS 2020) League on Thursday, Hardeep Singh Puri, Minister of State (Independent Charge) said that there will be a quarterly cleanliness assessment of cities and towns in India.
Parameters pertaining to wastewater treatment &reuse and fecal sludge management have been given special focus.
The fifth edition of the annual cleanliness survey of urban India will be conducted from January – February 2020 by the Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs (MoHUA) under the aegis of Swachh Bharat Mission– Urban (SBM-U).
Durga Shanker Mishra, Secretary, MoHUA; VK Jindal, Joint Secretary & Mission Director of SBM(U) were present during the launch of SS 2020 League. Principal Secretaries, State Mission Directors and Municipal Commissioners of 106 cities with population of five lakh and above joined the event through video conference.
Speaking on the need for a quarterly evaluation mechanism, 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”.
Elucidating the process of the exercise, Meena said, “SS League 2020 will be conducted in three 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 monthly updation of SBM-U online MIS by cities along with citizen’s validation on the 12 service level progress indicators through outbound calls.”
He added, “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 one lakh. The performance of cities in SS League 2020 will be crucial to their ranking in Swachh Survekshan 2020 due to the 25 percent weightage of the quarterly assessments to be included in the annual survey in January 2020.”
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The exercise will cover all Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) that have come into existence on or before 31 December 2018.
Stating the achievements of SS 2019, Puri 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 percent of their wards.
