Swachh Bharat ranking 2017: 30 cities from Gujarat are part of the list

This is a huge improvement as 2016 list had only three cities from the state

Gujarat has managed to emerge as the country's cleanest state. The state has managed to leap frog from having just three cities in 2016's Swachh Bharat Survey to having 31 cities in 2017's list. In fact, it has 12 cities in the Top 50.

According to the Swachh Survekshan 2017 (Swachh Bharat survey 2017), Gujarat's Surat is ranked at four, followed by Vadodara at 10 and Ahmedabad at 14. Survey found Madhya Pradesh's Indore to be the most clean city in the country.

Thirty cities from Gujarat are part of the list this year. This is a huge improvement considering the fact that mere three cities from the state were part of the list with 73 cities last year. 

On the back of a slew of measures taken up by the state government, this year Gujarat has pipped Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, last year's joint winners, to see the highest number of cities becoming part of the list.

Diamond city Surat emerged as the cleanest from Gujarat at number 4, after Indore, Bhopal and Vizag, up from the sixth position last year. Surat had undergone a major change after the major breakout of a plague in mid-90s that led the city to take a vow of cleanliness. 

In 2016, from Gujarat, Rajkot and Gandhinagar also featured in the survey ranking along with Surat. As against a seventh place last year, Rajkot fell to 18th rank this year. And, Gandhinagar jumped from 42nd place in 2016 to 20th position in 2017.

The improvement in rankings did not happen overnight. The state has developed a five year action plan under Mahatma Gandhi Swachhata Mission, from 2014 to 2019, to make Gujarat open defecation free, Zero waste, dust free and green. The mission was launched in February 2014 

The state has already achieved about 75 per cent of sanitation coverage and over 5,000 villages in the state are estimated to be open defecation free (ODF) by the end of 2017. 

The Quality Council of India had carried out the survey across India deploying 421 assessors for spot assessment of 17,500 locations in 434 towns and cities. The criteria and weightedness for different components of sanitation used in the survey included solid waste management, citizen feedback, independent observation. Solid waste management has been accorded the maximum weightage of 45 per cent our of the total 2000 marks. It included door-to-door collection, processing and disposal as well as open defecation free status etc.