4,751 cities assessed in Swachh Survekshan
NEW DELHI, NOVEMBER 09: President Droupadi Murmu will confer the 10th edition of the Swachh Survekshan Awards 2025-26 at a ceremony at Vigyan Bhawan here on November 11, recognising India’s cleanest cities and top-performing urban local bodies across various categories.
The awards will also recognise leading performers under the ‘Swachh Shehar Jodi’ initiative, a city-to-city mentorship programme aimed at improving urban sanitation and waste management through peer learning.
The 10th edition of Swachh Survekshan, conducted under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, assessed more than 4,751 cities across the country, marking a significant expansion from the 73 urban local bodies covered in its inaugural edition in 2016.
Union Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs Manohar Lal and Minister of State Tokhan Sahu will also attend the awards ceremony.
The Swachh Survekshan 2025-26 assessment introduced several new indicators, with greater emphasis on citizen feedback, cleanliness of urban riverfronts, coastlines and water bodies, prevention of open defecation and urination, cleanliness at tourist and heritage sites, and sanitation awareness initiatives in schools.
Urban local bodies were evaluated across 43 indicators covering 10 assessment areas, including waste segregation, collection and transportation, solid waste management, visible cleanliness, sanitation access, mechanised desludging, used-water management, institutional strengthening, sanitation workers’ welfare and citizen grievance redressal.
More than 3,000 trained assessors conducted on-ground evaluations, supported by GPS-enabled monitoring. The entire assessment process, from evidence submission to verification, was conducted digitally and subjected to quality checks.
The ‘Swachh Shehar Jodi’ initiative, launched on September 27, 2025, brought together 70 mentor cities and 191 mentee cities across 33 States and Union Territories to strengthen urban waste management through institutional collaboration and exchange of best practices.
The performance of mentee cities showed improvement across several cleanliness indicators compared with Swachh Survekshan 2024.
Visible cleanliness improved from 48 per cent to 70 per cent, while door-to-door waste collection rose from 52 per cent to 74 per cent. Source segregation increased from 16 per cent to 30 per cent, access to sanitation from 11 per cent to 38 per cent, and used-water management from 32 per cent to 53 per cent.
Advocacy for cleanliness also improved from 48 per cent to 66 per cent, reflecting gains in sanitation awareness and service delivery.
