Indore cleanest, Gonda dirtiest, Navi Mumbai is at Number 8

Indore in Madhya Pradesh is India’s cleanest city and Gonda in Uttar Pradesh the filthiest, a nationwide cleanliness survey by the Union Urban Development Ministry has found. Navi Mumbai in Maharashtra ranks eighth.

The survey of 434 cities, conducted as part of the Modi government’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, or Clean India Mission, has seen the historic city in MP knock off Karnataka’s Mysuru, which has been topping the rankings.

Mysuru slipped to number five, an indication it failed to stick to the sanitation standards it achieved in 2016 and 2014. Waste collection, solidwaste processing and checking open defecation were among other criteria cities were measured against.

Bhopal, another city in the BJP-ruled MP, Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh and Surat in Gujarat are the other five cleanest cities, says the third edition of the Swachh Survekshan released on Thursday by Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu. The cleanliness survey was carried out during January and February.

Launched in 2014, the Swachh Bharat campaign aims to make India clean and open-defecation free by 2019, the 150th birth anniversary year of Mahatma Gandhi.

The New Delhi Municipal Council area, the Capital’s power district where 1.5 % of Delhi’s 16.78 million resident live, is out of the top five. It slipped to seventh position, dropping three places from last year. The rest of Delhi, too, failed to impress.

India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh is also the dirtiest. Fifty of the 62 of its cities that were surveyed ranked below 300. The holy city of Varanasi, which is also Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s parliamentary constituency, is the only exception. It was ranked 32, a dramatic improvement from 2014 when it was close to the bottom at 418 among 476 cities.

One of the oldest living cities in the world, Varanasi has got more than Rs 20,000 crore since 2014 to upgrade its rundown infrastructure, an indication of the effort and money it would require to improve India’s urban landscape.

Gonda, a town in Uttar Pradesh, is the dirtiest at 434. Bhusawal in Maharashtra is a rank above. Bihar’s Bagaha is at number 432, Hardoi in UP 431 and Bihar’s Katihar at 430.

North India continues to fare poorly. Of the 10 dirtiest cities five are in Uttar Pradesh, two each in Bihar and Punjab and one in Maharashtra.