Cities with high rankings in Swachhata rankings now compete in new ‘Golden Cities Club’ category | India News – Times of India

NEW DELHI: After being tagged as the cleanest city for seven consecutive times, Indore and some other traditionally high-performing cities such as Surat and Navi Mumbai will no longer be allowed to compete with other cities in the annual Swachhta (beauty) rankings. Such cities will be put in a new category called “Golden Cities Club” and will have a separate competition with each other, housing and urban affairs minister Manohar Lal Khattar said on Friday.
This is being done so that cities that are not performing well can aspire to top position by taking more measures to improve cleanliness and sanitation, sources said. Khattar and his cabinet colleague CR Patil also announced the government’s mega plan to transform two lakh “difficult and dirty” places in a time-bound manner, which has been described as Units for the purpose of cleanliness (CTUs), during the two-week activities to mark the 10th anniversary of the Swachh Bharat Mission.
Responding to a question as to why only cities like Indore remain the cleanest city every year and what steps are being taken to encourage others, Khattar said, “It is true that sometimes a student who gets first rank in the first class continues to get first rank every year. Sometimes we hear that ‘if only one gets first rank, why should others bother’. When we see the competition among cities, we see that Indore repeatedly gets first rank. That is why we have come up with a new category for cities that get first rank, called the Golden Cities Club.”
Sources said that the top rankers of three consecutive years can be placed in this category and they will prepare a matrix based on the trend of the last three years. They added that there will be a separate category for ranking these cities and the benchmark parameters will be very high.
Khattar said that once a city in the Golden Cities Club underperforms, it will be taken off the list and will eventually compete with the large number of cities in the Swachh Survekshan (sanitation survey). Sharing details of the two-week long campaign on Swachhta Mission starting September 17, Khattar and Patil said this year’s theme is “Swabhav Swachhata Sanskaar Swachhata (4S)”.