MoHUA declares Ambikapur, Rajkot, Surat, Mysuru, Indore and Navi Mumbai as '5-star garbage-free cities'

MoHUA minister Hardeep Singh Puri said that Ambikapur, Rajkot, Surat, Mysuru, Indore and Navi Mumbai have been certified with 5-Star ratings for Garbage free cities.

New Delhi: The Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) on Tuesday tagged six cities from five different states across the country with 5-Star ratings as far as garbage segregation and management is concerned.

Announcing results of star rating of garbage-free cities, MoHUA minister Hardeep Singh Puri said that Ambikapur (Chhattisgarh), Rajkot (Gujarat), Surat(Gujarat), Mysuru (Karnataka), Indore (Madhya Pradesh) and Navi Mumbai (Maharashtra) have been certified with 5-Star ratings.

“Five years ago, we introduced Swachh Survekshan (SS), the annual cleanliness survey for urban India that has proven immensely successful when it comes to improving urban cleanliness through a spirit of healthy competition,” said Puri. He, however, admitted that since it is a ranking system, several of our cities, despite doing exceptionally well, were not being recognized appropriately.

“The Ministry, therefore, devised the Star Rating Protocol for Garbage Free Cities - a comprehensive framework similar to our examination systems where each ward in every city must achieve a certain standard across 24 different components of solid waste management (SWM) and is graded based on overall marks received,” Puri said.

The protocol has been devised in a holistic manner including components such as the cleanliness of drains & water bodies, plastic waste management, managing construction & demolition waste, etc. which are critical drivers for achieving garbage-free cities.

“While the key thrust of this protocol is on SWM, it also takes care of ensuring certain minimum standards of sanitation through a set of prerequisites defined in the framework,” the Minister said.

For the assessment year 2019-2020, 65 cities have been certified as 3-Star and 70 cities as 1-Star City.

While announcing the results of the Star Rating of Garbage Free Cities, Puri also launched the revised protocol for the Star Rating of Garbage Free Cities at the event. The Star Rating Protocol was launched by the Ministry in January 2018 to institutionalize a mechanism for cities to achieve Garbage Free status and to motivate cities to achieve higher degrees of cleanliness.

In the recent phase of Star Rating Assessment, 1435 cities applied. During the assessments, 1.19 crore citizen feedbacks and over 10 lakh geo-tagged pictures were collected and 5175 solid waste processing plants were visited by 1210 field assessors. While 698 cities cleared the desktop assessment, 141 cities have been certified with Star Rating during field assessment.

It may be mentioned here that the Housing Ministry’s flagship project Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (SBM-U) since its launch in 2014, has made significant progress in the area of both sanitation and solid waste management.

As of today, 4324 Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) have been declared open defecation free (4204 certified ODF), 1306 cities certified ODF+ and 489 cities certified ODF++.