Swachh Survekshan survey 2019 Capital city is ranked the 128th cleanest city among 4,237 cities :

• Shimla cleanest in Himachal Pradesh,128th in India
• The Shimla city ranked the 128th cleanest city among 4,237 cities in the country and is the cleanest of the 54 towns in the state in the 2019 Swachh Survekshan survey.
• The results of the digital paperless survey were declared today by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) in New Delhi.
• No town in Himachal could come close to Shimla, showing huge gaps in cleanliness.
• Indore is the country’s cleanest city for the third consecutive year. Significantly, Shimla performed well in two major swachh components - the direct observation and citizens feedback.
• But the city scored dismal in the service-level benchmark as the city failed to segregate the garbage at source at the time when the survey was carried out in December-January.
• Shimla scored 1,176 and Indore 1,241 in the category of direct observation, while the hill city got 1,010 marks and Indore got 1,129 marks of 1,250 under the category of citizens’ feedback.
• But Shimla scored dismal 25 marks, Indore scored 1,050, in the service-level benchmark that spoiled its ranking among other 127 top-ranking competitors.
• Asandh in Haryana was adjudged the cleanest city in the North.
• After Shimla, the industrial town of Baddi performed better than other 54 towns which participated in the survey. Baddi got 411st position, the second cleanest town after Shimla in Himachal.
• Dharamsala, which was brought under the Smart City mission prior to Shimla in 2015-16, was placed at a dismal 956th position. Mandi figured at 806 position.
• In the 2018 survey, Shimla was placed at 144th position. Improved the ranking, but  the  reason is that could not upload the documents in time regarding the segregation of garbage at source. So scored very less in this category that spoiled the ranking.

Swachh Survekshan :

Swachh Survekshan is a ranking exercise taken up by the Government of India to assess rural and urban areas for their levels of cleanliness and active implementation of Swachhata mission initiatives in a timely and innovative manner.

The objective of the survey is to encourage large scale citizen participation and create awareness amongst all sections of society about the importance of working together towards making towns and cities a better place to live in. Additionally, the survey also intends to foster a spirit of healthy competition among towns and cities to improve their service delivery to citizens, towards creating cleaner cities and towns.

The Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India takes up the Swachh Survekshan in urban areas and the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation in rural areas. The Quality Council of India (QCI) has been commissioned the responsibility of carrying out the assessment.

Since the start of SBM in 2014, urban areas of 23 states / UTs have become ODF, and more than 94% cities are already ODF. Nearly 63 lakh individual household toilets (94% progress), and more than 5 lakh community / public toilet seats (more than 100% progress) have been constructed. Parallelly, more than 42,000 public toilet blocks across 1400 cities have been mapped and visible on Google maps. The Google toilet locator also provides an option for citizens to provide their feedback after using the toilets. Waste processing has gone up to 52% (compared to a mere 18% at the start of the Mission).