The stage is all set for the eighth edition of the world’s largest urban swachhata (cleanliness) survey – Swachh Survekshan 2023 – Mera Shehar, Meri Pehchan.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) launched the Field Assessment for Swachh Survekshan (SS) 2023. Under SS 2023, around 3,000 assessors will take the field for assessment from 1 July.
The assessors will study the performances of 4500+ cities across 46 indicators and the survey is expected to be completed within a month.
Originally designed as a competitive monitoring tool, Swachh Survekshan was introduced in 2016, with the objective to help cities to achieve the goal of sustainable sanitation and waste management in a fast-track competitive manner.
Swachh Survekshan has enthused cities with a healthy spirit of competitiveness to improve urban sanitation and ensure the best service delivery to their citizens.
It is expected to engage with a whopping 10 crore citizens during this year’s assessment making it indisputably the world’s largest annual urban cleanliness survey. Conducted over four quarters, the first three quarters of assessment have already been completed successfully.
A new third quarter for Swachh Survekshan 2023 was introduced this year and the States/ cities geared up for the survey enhancing their activities and level of preparedness. Avoiding the acute heat wave conditions across the nation in the last two months, the fourth quarter is now being launched from 1 July 2023.
Launching the fourth and final quarter of the assessment of Swachh Survekshan 2023 which is also the most rigorous as well as awaited, Secretary in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs Manoj Joshi said: “Last seven years of Swachh Survekshan have been the highlight of Swachh Bharat Mission and we have to continue that this year as well.”
“We continue to make efforts to make it easier and useful for smaller and medium size cities so that Swachh Survekshan continues to be a management tool for improvement in sanitation,” he said.
Emphasising the transformation of man-hole to machine hole, the senior official highlighted the importance of SafaiMitra Suraksha. Speaking on waste processing, he focused on the need to segregate at source. He added that he was optimistic that Survekshan would keep motivating cities to become better in sanitation.