Swachh Survekshan: Sangam city’s ranking takes a hit
PRAYAGRAJ : Sangam city’s ranking has taken a hit in the ‘Swachh Survekshan-2021’ the results of which were declared on Saturday. The city was ranked 26th in the country and fifth in the state in the survey results released by the union housing and urban affairs ministry.
Prayagraj’s ranking at the national level dropped six places as compared to the cleanliness survey of 2020 while in the state too, the city’s ranking came down by a notch as compared to 2020.
In the last year’s survey, Prayagraj had bagged 20th rank in the country and fourth in the state among cities having a population of over a million. However, this time around, Sangam city could secure 26th rank in the country and 5th in the state.
Critics, however, point out that failure to ensure cleanliness in the city as per set government norms cost Prayagraj this time. The slip is all the more obvious if one takes into consideration Sangam city’s number 1 ranking in terms of improvement in cleanliness in the 2017 survey—a feat that saw mayor Abhilasha Gupta ‘Nandi’ and the former municipal commissioner Devendra
Pandey being felicitated in New Delhi by the then union urban development minister M Venkaiah Naidu, they claim.
“We are constantly working towards improving the cleanliness in the city through better waste collection, management and disposal efforts. We will review the scores and our performance in the latest survey and work to better the things. All efforts would be made to improve the ranking in the next survey,” said Uttam Kumar Verma, environmental engineer, PNN.
Municipal officials requesting anonymity said this time the PNN and other agencies focused their attention on key arterial roads for cleanliness and pressed even modern machines for this but failed to do the same in bylanes and intersecting smaller roads. The central team as part of the survey, however, visited the narrow lanes and interacted with locals which finally saw a poor though truer picture emerge.
Some of the areas in which the city is believed to have lost marks in the survey include poor collection of door-to-door waste, segregation of dry and wet waste, disposal of bulk garbage at a single spot, poor crackdown on individuals indulging in littering among others.
As many as 342 cities were given some star ratings in this year’s annual cleanliness survey, with a total of 4,320 cities taking part in it, which as per the Union ministry of housing and urban affairs was the “world’s largest urban cleanliness survey.”