Mahana asks bosses of civic bodies to ensure cleanliness

LUCKNOW: After Swachh Bharat survey 2017 portrayed India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh as the filthiest, the Yogi Adityanath government is pulling out all stops to improve the state’s ranking in the new appraisal for 2018.

As the Centre commenced on Thursday, what is being dubbed as the world’s largest cleanliness survey, the Swachh Survekshan survey, UP’s urban development minister Satish Mahana urged mayors of cities and civic bosses to take up the cleanliness drive as a mission.

The tone was set by UP CM himself when he along with some of his cabinet colleagues picked up the broom and cleaned a busy road in Balu Adda colony in the state capital recently. Yogi administered a pledge of cleanliness to officials and asked them to clean up their neighbourhoods and commit 100 hours every year to the cause.

Now his cabinet colleague Mahana has taken up cudgel and asked heads of 653 local bodies and all mayors of the municipal corporation to launch a public movement to create awareness for keeping the cities clean.

UP got figured pretty low on all cleanliness parameters in the nationwide cleanliness survey in 2017. While Gonda turned out to be the dirtiest, Lucknow stood on

235th position in the 434 cities that were surveyed all over the country, last year.

Except PM Modi’s Varanasi parliamentary constituency, which ranked 32, no other UP city made it to the top 100. Fifty of the 62 of UP cities that were surveyed ranked below 300.

“This time of the total 4,041 towns in which this survey would be undertaken all over the country, 60 have been chosen from UP,” said Mahana.

The entire exercise is expected to be completed by March. The MINISTER released a list of questionnaire on which citizens feedback would be sought during the survey. “The cities ranking is done on 4,000 rating points out of which 1400 points have been set aside for citizens’ feedback,” he said. We would have to ensure that cleanliness is maintained across the state. In the next few days, government officials across the state would be expected to spend more time cleaning areas under their jurisdiction, he said.