Clear problem

How waste management of the four cleanest cities is worse than that of the cities ranked below them

sanitation and by the print and digital campaigns carried out by the urban local bodies to promote sensitising programmes. While Vizag bagged 90 points, Bhopal 87 and Indore 85; cities in Kerala, which generally discourage the use of big hoardings because they cannot be reused, hardly received any points. Kozhikode and Alleppey received zero points, while Thiruvananthapuram got 1 point.

Cities also expressed dissatisfaction with the way the Quality Control of India assessors carried out their job and the malfunctioning of the mobile app used by over 3.7 million citizens for feedback. “Usually a team of three assessors visited a city and they would only have enough time to go through government documents rather than go on site inspections,” says an official with the Mysuru urban local body. This is understandable because the surveys were carried out by 471 assessors who visited over 17,500 locations within January and February. “Panaji city lost points on citizen feedback because the name was changed to Goa in February and the votes were not counted,” says the official.

Shibu Nair, programme director of Zero Waste at Thanal, a non-profit based in Kerala, highlights another fundamental predicament—giving cities like Indore full points in waste collection and transportation indicates that according to the government, no improvement is required. “But cities can improve on all the parameters,” says he.

In fact, experts warn that the long-term impact of the rankings will be an endorsement of the unsustainable centralised waste management systems. “Cities where municipal corporations are trying to involve communities will give up because their efforts are being penalised,” says Nair.

With inputs from Richa Agarwal