President Murmu confers Swachh Survekshan Awards 2025-26 as India's urban waste processing reaches 80% across 4,751 cities. View full list of winners.
In a major milestone for municipal governance and public policy, President Droupadi Murmu honoured the nation’s top-performing urban local bodies at the Swachh Survekshan Awards 2025–26 in New Delhi. Organized by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), official data released via the Press Information Bureau (PIB) reveals that urban waste processing across India has jumped from 16% a decade ago to 80%, alongside door-to-door collection coverage expanding from 44% to over 96%.
The decade-long evolution of the Swachh Bharat Mission has reshaped urban spatial management, successfully remediating legacy waste dumpsites to free nearly 11,000 acres of prime city land for productive public and economic use. The 10th edition of the annual survey scaled up to assess 4,751 cities, drawing direct feedback from 2.70 crore citizens and leveraging 3,000 trained assessors equipped with GPS-enabled monitoring tools.
Peer Mentorship and Institutional Innovation
A flagship institutional reform introduced in this assessment cycle is the Swachh Shehar Jodi (SSJ) framework, designed on a peer-mentorship model to pair high-performing mentor cities with lower-ranked mentee municipalities to accelerate capacity building.
- Top Swachh Shehar Jodis: Ahmedabad & Sanand, Indore & Depalpur, and Tirupati & Kuppam led the collaborative mentorship rankings.
- Super Swachh League: Navi Mumbai (Maharashtra), Surat (Gujarat), and Vijayawada (Andhra Pradesh) secured the top three spots nationwide.
- Million-Plus Population Leaders: Visakhapatnam (GVMC), Jabalpur, and Lucknow emerged as leaders among major metro areas.
- PRAGATI-50 Initiative: 50 cities have been designated to be developed into Model Clean Cities using real-time tech monitoring and automated waste management infrastructure.
“Cleanliness cannot be achieved through the efforts of any single institution alone and requires active participation from all stakeholders. Meaningful progress in sanitation is possible when citizens, local administrations, and sanitation workers work together.”
Specialized Categorization: Rivers, Coasts, and Mountains
Recognizing the diverse ecological challenges facing local administrations, the 2025–26 assessment framework expanded specialized award categories targeting vulnerable ecosystems:
- Clean Himalayan Cities: Rudrapur (Uttarakhand), Jammu (J&K), and Shopian (J&K).
- Swachh River Front Towns: Rewa (Madhya Pradesh), Bilaspur (Chhattisgarh), and Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh).
- Swachh Coastal Towns: Puri (Odisha), Alappuzha (Kerala), and Ratnagiri (Maharashtra).
“Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Swachh Survekshan has evolved from assessing 73 cities in 2016 to over 4,700 cities today. The real success lies in turning sanitation into a permanent operational habit and collective civic responsibility.”
Bharatha Strategic Perspective
The scale of Swachh Survekshan demonstrates a major paradigm shift in Indian federalism, where municipal performance is incentivized through transparent data, peer learning, and citizen feedback. By reclaiming 11,000 acres of urban land from legacy dumpsites and achieving an 80% waste processing rate, India’s urban policy is moving rapidly toward circular economy principles. As the PRAGATI-50 framework rolls out, technology-driven municipal administration will be critical to supporting India’s rapid urbanization while safeguarding environmental public health.
Reporting and source materials courtesy of Press Information Bureau.