Navi Mumbai has been rated 5 star in the new list of garbage-free cities announced on Monday by the Union Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs, Hardeep Puri. Surat, Rajkot, Indore, Mysore and Ambikapur in Chhattisgarh have also been rated 5-star garbage-free cities. Navi Mumbai has consistently figured among the list of clean cities in India. It was ranked 7th in the 2019 edition of the Swachh Sarvekshan.
The Star Rating Protocol was launched by the Ministry in January 2018 to institutionalize a mechanism for cities to achieve Garbage Free status, and to motivate cities to achieve higher degrees of cleanliness.
Puri said, “Five years ago, we introduced Swachh Survekshan (SS), the annual cleanliness survey for urban India that has proven immensely successful. However, since it is a ranking system, several of our cities, despite doing exceptionally well, were not being recognized appropriately. The Ministry, therefore, devised the Star Rating Protocol for Garbage Free Cities - a comprehensive framework where each ward in every city must achieve a certain standard across 24 different components of solid waste management (SWM) and is graded based on overall marks received”.
The Star Rating Protocol has been devised in a holistic manner including components such as the cleanliness of drains and water bodies, plastic waste management, managing construction & demolition waste, etc. which are critical drivers for achieving garbage free cities. While the key thrust of this protocol is on Solid Waste Management, it also takes care of ensuring certain minimum standards of sanitation through a set of prerequisites defined in the framework.
Accordingly as per the 2020 survey, 6 cities have been graded 5 star, 65 cities are rated 3 Star and 70 cities are rated 1 Star.
34 of Maharashtra’s cities including Chandrapur, Dhule, Jalgaon, Jalna, Thane and Mira-Bhayandar have been given 3 star rating while 41 cities including Ahmednagar, Akola, Nashik, Vasai-Virar and Kalyan-Dombivili have been rated 1 star.
Altogether, 1,435 cities / urban local bodies had applied for Star Rating Assessment. During the assessments, 1.19 crore citizen feedbacks and over 10 lakh geo-tagged pictures were collected and 5175 solid waste processing plants were visited by 1210 field assessors.
While 698 cities cleared the desktop assessment, 141 cities have been certified with Star Rating during field assessment. “The low number of certifications signifies the rigorous and robust certification mechanism of the protocol” said Durga Shankar Mishra, Secretary, MoHUA.
Since its launch in 2014, Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (SBM-U) has made significant progress in the area of both sanitation and solid waste management. 66 lakhs individual household toilets and over 6 lakhs community/ public toilets have been constructed/ or are under construction. In the area of solid waste management, 96% of wards have 100% door-to door collection while 65% of the total waste generated is being processed.
