No city in Kerala is clean enough

KOCHI: The cities and towns in Kerala have performed  dismally in the Swachh Survekshan survey – 2018, the national cleanliness ranking, of the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Development.   The state’s  cities and towns do not find a place in the top 52 list of awardees under various categories of annual ranking, while other South Indian cities like Mysore, Mangalore and Tirupati are in the list. Siddipet  in Telengana is the cleanest city in South India zone. The survey was conducted for around 4,200 cities.

Cities having population of one lakh and more and capital cities were ranked at the national level and cities with a population of less than one lakh were ranked at the zonal level. Based on their performance, awards have been conferred on  29 cities/ cantonment boards at the national level and 20 cities at the zonal level. Three best performing states have also been selected. There are 15 sub-categories of cleanliness awards. Though the union ministry  included six municipal corporations of Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Kochi, Thrissur, Kozhikode and Kannur and other towns like Palakkad and Alappuzha for the survey, none of them had achieved  any notable  performance.

Meanwhile, top sources at State Suchitwa Mission told DC that the Union ministry was  yet to release the complete list of cities with their ranking. “We will be able to know the exact status of each city only after the final list is published. It is not clear whether any of the cities could improve their score from the previous year,” an official said. Kochi and other cities had been trailing in the last two national surveys. Though Kochi was ranked fifth in the first assessment, it slipped to the 75th position next year. In 2017, Kochi nosedived to  271 with only a few cities behind it. Thiruvananthapuram was the worst performer with a rank of 372 while Kozhikode was at 254.

Meanwhile, former Kochi mayor K.J.  Sohan said that there have been anomalies in the methodology used for categorising cities and towns. “Small towns like Alappuzha and Palakkad have been included in the same category  of a big city like Kochi. All the towns and cities in Kerala were included in the one lakh  to 10 lakh population category. It is incorrect and misleading to place cities with different populations in the same category of ranking,” he said. Unlike the previous Swachh Survekshan surveys, this year the thrust was on sustainability of waste management and maintenance of public and community toilets. Through the citizens’ feedback app, the ministry officials could assess the real situation in each city.