KOCHI: The Union urban development ministry has chosen nine Kerala towns for the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) ranking exercise called Swachh Sarvekshan for clean cities in the country for the year 2016 - 17. Preparatory works ahead of the sanitation survey in these towns including Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Kozhikode, Kollam, Alappuzha, Thrissur, Guruvayoor, Palakkad and Kannur have already begun. The ranking will be announced on February 15, 2017.
It was on August 6 that Union minister for urban development Venkaiah Naidu formally inaugurated the sanitation survey. This year, the MoUD has included 500 towns from across the country with a population of one lakh and above while in 2015, only 73 cities were selected for rating procedure. The 500 account for about 70 percent of the urban population in the country.
According to a MoUD release, more cities have been included to scale up the coverage of ranking exercise and encourage towns and cities to implement the SBM initiatives actively on time. After the last survey, 115 cities have achieved 'open defecation free' status in the country, the MoUD statistics show.
Open defecation free town, integrated solid waste management, door to door waste collection, processing and disposal, public and community toilet and individual toilets are some of the broad areas based on which the cities get the ranking. Among them, door to door collection, sweeping, collection and transportation of municipal solid waste got highest weightage with 40 per cent while processing and disposing of are given 20 percent.
The ranking will be in five phases like video conferencing with urban local bodies to share survey methodologies, awareness and citizen engagement, beginning of the survey, completion of data collection, analysis and publishing of the final results, with a detailed report, analysis and findings.
