Shimla civic body has pointed out fault in the Swachh Bharat Ranking on cleanliness for the year 2017 and underlined for separate yardstick to analyse mountain cities.
Shimla Municipal Corporation(SMC) Deputy Mayor Tikender Singh Panwar said on Friday that the recent released Swacch Survekshan 2017 data needs to be comprehended properly. "Whereas, Shimla has performed phenomenally well and secured 47th rank out of 500 cities, the matrix drawn for such a survey is faulty and does not help the mountain cities," he said.
Shimla has an overall rank of 47 but happens to be first in the category of 2 lakh to 10 lakh population cities in the country he said, adding that otherwise also Shimla also happens to be fourth in the entire northern region.
Pointing out on the matrix being faulty, he said that the need for a different set of criteria for analysing the mountain cities becomes all the more impertinent as the mountain cities pose altogether a different challenge and the cost of raising the infrastructure is almost 4 times than in the cities on flatland.
“In Shimla just 25 per cent of the houses are connected through roads. So, the matrix must consider this important impediment. In such a situation to sustain the solid waste management door to door garbage collection is extremely an arduous task where it is the human resource needs to be deployed in larger numbers to sustain such an exercise,” he said.
“This means for obvious reasons there cannot be a match between a city like Chandigarh and Shimla,” he said, adding that still Shimla is far better than many cities of the plains where door to door garbage collection has increased almost by 100 per cent.
Furthermore, as the survey that deals with toilets and conditions prevailing, the toilets constructed in a city like Shimla where water is supplied alternatively are bound to be more problematic than the plains and also tankers cannot reach the toilets owing to absence of road connectivity, he justified.
He lauded the public of Shimla for their overwhelming support in the city survey which too was one of the criteria of participation.