The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs launched a new category of awards titled ‘Prerak Dauur Samman’ as part of Swachh Survekshan 2021 (It is the annual cleanliness survey of urban India).
Prerak Dauur Samman
The Prerak Dauur Samman has a total of five additional subcategories:
Divya (Platinum), Anupam (Gold), Ujjwal (Silver), Udit (Bronze), Aarohi (Aspiring), with the top three cities being recognized in each.
In a departure from the present criteria of evaluating cities on population category, this new category will categorize cities on the basis of six select indicator wise performance criteria which are as follows:
- Segregation of waste into wet, dry and hazard categories
- Processing capacity against wet waste generated
- Processing and recycling of wet and dry waste
- Construction & Demolition (C&D) waste processing
- Percentage of waste going to landfills
- Sanitation status of cities
Swachh Survekhan has become a tool for citizen engagement in the spirit of a true ‘Jan Andolan’. With the new award system, the focus on citizen participation has taken a notch higher by introducing indicators that encourage innovations led by citizens, start-ups, entrepreneurs and swachhata champions amongst others.
Swachh Survekshan 2018, which became the world’s largest cleanliness survey, ranked 4203 cities and was followed by Swachh Survekshan 2019. It not only covered 4237 cities but was also the first of its kind completely digital survey completed in a record time of 28 days. Swachh Survekshan 2020 continued the momentum and saw an unprecedented participation of 1.87 crore citizens.
Going a step forward, to ensure sustainability of on-ground performance of cities, the Ministry has also introduced Swachh Survekshan League last year, a quarterly cleanliness assessment of cities and towns to be done in three quarters and 25% weightage integrated into the final Swachh Survekshan results.
Since its launch in 2014, Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (SBM-U) has made significant progress in the area of both sanitation and solid waste management.
- 4324 Urban ULBs have been declared ODF (4204 certified ODF), 1306 cities certified ODF+ and 489 cities certified ODF++.
- 66 lakhs individual household toilets and over 6 lakhs community/ public toilets have been constructed/ or are under construction.
- Over 59,900 toilets across 2900+ cities have been made live on Google Maps.
- In the area of solid waste management, 96% of wards have 100% door-to door collection while 66% of the total waste generated is being processed. A total of six cities have been certified as 5 Star, 86 as 3 star and 64 as 1 star under the star rating protocol for garbage free cities.
