Rajkot, Surat, Indore, Navi Mumbai, Ambikapur And Mysore Get '5-Star' For Being Garbage-free

Six Indian cities have been given a five-star rating for their garbage management by the Central government. The six cities that were given the top 'five-star garbage-free' tag are Chhattisgarh's Ambikapur, Madhya Pradesh's Indore, Gujarat's Rajkot and Surat, Karnataka's Mysore and Maharashtra's Navi Mumbai.

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Union Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Singh Puri announced the results of garbage-free star ratings for the cities on Tuesday. A total of 141 cities have been rated out of which six are five star, 65 are three-star, 70 one-star.

New Delhi, Haryana's Karnal; Andhra Pradesh's Tirupati and Vijayawada; Chandigarh; Chhattisgarh's Bhilai Nagar; Gujarat's Ahmedabad; MP's Bhopal; and Jharkhand's Jamshedpur are among 'three-star garbage-free rating', Puri said. Among the 'one-star garbage-free cities' are: Delhi Cantonment, Rohtak (Haryana); Gwalior, Maheshwar, Khandwa, Badnawar and Hathod (all five in MP); and Gujarat's Vadodara, Bhavnagar and Vyara.

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Housing and Urban Affairs Secretary Durga Shanker Mishra said 1,435 cities applied for the 'Star Rating Assessment'. During the assessments, 1.19 crore citizen feedbacks and over 10 lakh geo-tagged pictures were collected and 5,175 solid waste processing plants were visited by 1,210 field assessors, he said.

While 698 cities cleared the desktop assessment, 141 cities have been certified with Star Rating during field assessment. The low number of certifications signifies the rigorous and robust certification mechanism of the protocol, Mishra said.

Puri said that the importance of sanitation and effective solid waste management have been brought to the forefront now due to the COVID-19 crisis. "In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the present (COVID) situation could have been much worse had it not been for the critical part that Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) has played in the last five years to ensure a high degree of cleanliness and sanitation in urban areas," he said.

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Puri said that under the Swachh Bharat Mission, while the government constructed lakhs of toilets, there has also been hygiene discipline among people. "I am absolutely sure that we benefited a lot (due to Swachh Bharat Mission) in dealing with COVID-19," he said.

"We have always been slight ahead of the curve. When problem is coming, we were ready to deal with it. The country would have managed to deal with it (COVID-19) even without SBM, but the cost would have been much higher. I think SBM helped us considerably in that case," he said. "The way forward is now that we will have to accelerate both Swachhta and other measures like ODF Plus because it was the greatest strength to fight the pandemic," Puri said.