Shimla cleanest in HP, 128th in India

Kuldeep Chauhan

Tribune News Service

Shimla, March 6

The capital city is 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, observe MoHA officials.

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. “We improved our ranking, but this time we could not upload the documents in time regarding the segregation of garbage at source. We scored very less in this category that spoiled our ranking,” said Shimla Mayor Kusum Sadret.