Indore has emerged as the cleanest city in the country this year yet again! With this Indore has become the city to have grabbed the prestigious Swachh Survekshan award for four times in a row. The city which is also known as the main financial centre of the state of Madhya Pradesh has been consistently topping the list for the last four years. The development was announced by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs which has released the Swachh Sarvekshan survey results for 2020.
India’s cleanest cities 2020: Top 10 cleanest cities
1. Indore
2. Surat
3. Navi Mumbai
4. Ambikapur (Chhattisgarh)
5. Mysore (Karnataka)
6. Vijayawada (Andhra Pradesh)
7. Ahmedabad (Gujarat)
8. New Delhi (NDMC)
9. Chandrapur (Maharashtra)
10. Khargone (Madhya Pradesh)
Indore has become the inspiration for the whole country by bagging the prestigious Swachh Sarvekshan award for the fourth time in a row, Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change Prakash Javadekar wrote from his official twitter account. He also took the opportunity to congratulate the Chief Minister of the state Shivraj Singh Chauhan along with the residents of the city for this.
Closely trailing Indore were the cities of Surat in Gujarat and Navi Mumbai in the state of Maharashtra which grabbed the second and the third spot on the list. This was the fifth edition of the Swachh Survekshan survey undertaken by the government. Ever since the Narendra Modi led BJP government came to power in 2014, extra emphasis has been laid on sanitation and rejuvenation of the cities. The government has also launched schemes like Swachh Bharat Mission, AMRUT, Smart City mission among others to take the initiative forward.
Apart from the large cities which were surveyed, smaller cities and towns having populations of less than a lakh residents were also part of the survey. On the front of smaller cities, the state of Maharashtra made a clean sweep grabbing 20 spots for its cities out of the top 25 in the category. The top three small cities on the list- Karad, Sasvad and Lonavala- all belong to Maharashtra. While Chhattisgarh grabbed two spots on the list of top 25, the states of Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan grabbed one spot each.
In an attempt to keep a separate track of the towns and cities which are situated on the banks of the Ganga river, the Ministry also issued a separate list for top performing Ganga towns. Among the large Gangetic cities, the Lok Sabha constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi Varanasi topped the list followed by megacity Kanpur(U.P) and Munger(Bihar) on second and third spot respectively. Prayagraj where the mighty river Yamuna converges with the Ganga also secured 4th rank on the list followed by Haridwar on the fifth spot from where the Ganga descends on the plains to traverse its path through the Northern plains. The BJP government at the centre had launched the Ganga cleaning mission-Namami Gange- in the year 2015 soon after it came to power in 2014.