Y.S. RANA :
Chandigarh : Chandigarh and Karnal (Haryana) made it to the list of 3-Star cities. Notably, no city from Himachal Pradesh and Punjab could make it either to 5-Star or 3-Star status. Mr Hardeep S Puri, Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs announced the ratings of cities on Tuesday. A total of six cities have been certified as 5-Star and 65 cities as 3-Star and 70 cities as 1-Star across the country for 2019-20. The minister also launched the revised protocol for star rating of garbage free cities.
The protocol was initiated in 2018 to institutionalize a mechanism for cities to achieve garbage free status and to motivate cities to achieve higher degrees of cleanliness. The ministry has devised a comprehensive framework where each ward in every city must achieve a certain standard across 24 different components of solid waste management (SWM). The protocol has been devised in a holistic manner including components such as cleanliness of drains and water bodies, plastic waste management, managing construction and demolition waste etc which are critical drivers for achieving garbage free cities.
Mr Durga Shankar Mishra, Secretary, MoHUA said in the conference that to ensure the protocol has a SMART framework and it was developed a three-stage assessment process. In the first stage, ULBs populate their progress data on the portal along with supporting documents within a particular timeframe. The second stage involves a desktop assessment by a third party agency selected and appointed by the ministry then the cities that clear the desktop assessment are verified through independent field level observation.
In the present star rating assessment 1435 cities have applied. During the assessment time, 1.19 crore citizen feedbacks and over 10 lakh geo-tagged pictures were collected and 5175 solid waste processing plants were visited by 1210 field assessors. While 698 cities cleared the desktop assessment, 141 cities have been certified with Star Rating during field assessment. In the light of pandemic, the ministry has issued detailed guidelines to all States and cities on special cleaning of public places and collection and disposal of bio medical waste.
The ministry was also appreciated that the services of sanitation workers were being duly recognized by the authorities as well citizens alike. Mr Puri also said that ministry was aware of the adverse impact of financial stress during lock down. Hence a special micro credit facility for the street vendors to have easy access was being launched to support nearly 50 lakh vendors. Similarly to mitigate the hardships of urban migrants an affordable rental housing complexes was being launched.
Elaborating on the way forward for the Mission, the Minister said, “Our vision is to ensure holistic and sustainable sanitation across urban India through effective faecal sludge management through safe containment, transportation, disposal and processing along with 100 per cent waste water treatment in citiesbefore discharging into water bodies, and their maximum possible reuse. We also intend to achieve 100 per cent scientific and resource efficient SWM based on 3R and circular economy.
Since its launch in 2014, Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (SBM-U) has made significant progress in the area of both sanitation and solid waste management. Today, 4324 Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) have been declared ODF (4204 certified ODF), 1306 cities certified ODF+ and 489 cities certified ODF++. Moreover, 66 lakhs individual household toilets and over 6 lakhs community/ public toilets have been constructed/ or are under construction. In the area of solid waste management, 96 per cent of wards have 100 per cent door-to door collection while 65 per cent of the total waste generated is being processed.