Swachh Survekshan 2020: Modi govt to launch Swachh Survekshan League tomorrow

Hardeep S Puri, Minister of State (I/C) for Housing & Urban Affairs will launch Swachh Survekshan 2020 League at the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), New Delhi tomorrow. Swachh Survekshan League 2020 will be a quarterly cleanliness assessment of cities and towns in India and will be integrated with Swachh Survekshan 2020, the 5th edition of the annual cleanliness survey of urban India to be conducted between January - February 2020 by MoHUA under the aegis of Swachh Bharat Mission- Urban (SBM-U). 

The objective of the Swachh Survekshan (SS) survey, which is conducted by an independent third party, is to encourage large scale citizen participation, ensure sustainability of initiatives taken towards garbage free and open defecation free cities, provide credible outcomes validated by third party certification, institutionalize existing systems through online processes and create awareness amongst all sections of society about the importance of working together towards making towns and cities a better place to live in. Additionally, the survey also intends to foster a spirit of healthy competition among towns and cities to improve their service delivery to citizens, towards creating cleaner cities. 

The first edition of the annual cleanliness survey, ‘Swachh Survekshan-2016’ survey for the rating of 73 cities was conducted in January 2016, followed by ‘Swachh Survekshan-2017’ conducted in January-February 2017 ranking 434 cities. 

The third round of Swachh Survekshan in 2018 was a quantum leap of scale - conducted across 4,203 cities in 66 days, and became the largest ever Pan India Sanitation Survey in the world, impacting around 40 crore people. 

The 4th edition, Swachh Survekshan 2019 covered 4237 cities in a record time of 28 days and was a fully digitized and paperless survey. While SS 2016 had seen Mysuru emerge as the cleanest city in India, Indore has retained the title of the Cleanest City in the last three years.