Filtering the Heap: On Inequality and Clean Cities

What is proving to be an approximate sequence in the annual ‘Swachh Survekshan’ awards, Indore was ranked as the cleanest city for the fifth year, thereafter Surat and Vijayawada, Chhattisgarh was the cleanest state for the third time in the category of ‘State with more than 100 Urban Local Bodies’. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency Varanasi won for the cleanest ‘Ganga City’. The organizers of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs surveyed 4,320 cities for almost a month and sought feedback from 42 million people. The metrics were (city) garbage disposal, open defecation free rating, efficiency and maintenance of community toilets and safe management of sewage sludge. The ‘Survey’ awards have a wide range of categories that separate cities based on their population. While they attempt to capture the diversity of urban agglomerations over the other, the criticism is hard to overcome: each state has at least a few participants who will top one category or the other, thus rendering the process a huge appeasement. can make plans. Along with a category like ‘States with more than 100 Urban Local Bodies (ULBs)’, where Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh ranked second and third respectively, there was also a top rank for ‘States with less than 100 ULBs’ where Jharkhand was . Fair justice done. Then there was a ‘Ganga’ city and a category for different population-wise categories. This year there was a novel ‘Prerak Daur Samman’ in which Indore, Surat, Navi Mumbai, New Delhi Municipal Council and Tirupati were classified as ‘Divya’ (Platinum). These were assessed for solid waste management. Unsurprisingly, these were units that were already on top of other categories.

The rankings serve two broad purposes: one promoting promotion and recognition for other winners, but also the motivation to climb higher on the totem pole. Although the number of cities surveyed has increased since the first edition of the survey in 2016, it appears that the same cities – for example Indore, Surat – top the list. Six years is a good time to take stock of what the ranking program intends to achieve: is it prompting cities to significantly allocate resources to improving sanitation? Are clean cities clean because they are in a better position to access state funds and thus able to move away from other cities? Do states focus their energy and money on keeping certain cities clean in order to rank in any broad category? Reducing complex metrics like cleanliness and hygiene to blunt in rankings can often inspire a false sense of progress. There should be a more qualitative analysis, both at the regional level and at the center, of whether India’s cities are getting cleaner overall or if the numbers are hiding disparity.