PANAJI
Union Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri on Saturday launched the ‘Protocol for Star-Rating of Garbage-Free Cities’.
The star-rating initiative, developed by the Swachh Bharat Mission “ Urban will rate cities on a 7-star rating system based on multiple cleanliness indicators for solid waste management, which will include door-to-door garbage collection, bulk generator compliance, source segregation, sweeping, scientific processing of waste, scientific land filling, plastic waste management, construction and demolition management, dump remediation and citizen grievance redressal system, among others.
Cities will be rated based on their compliance with the protocol conditions specified for each of the rating. Furthermore, the city should be Open Defecation Free before it is given rating of 3 or above. While cities may self-declare themselves as 1-star, 2-star or 4-star, MoHUA will carry out an additional verification through an independent third party to certify them.
The rating provides stakeholders with a single metric to rate a city’s cleanliness, rather than separately evaluating multiple factors which contribute to a city’s overall cleanliness and garbage free status.
The protocol will involve participation of all stakeholders and common people to aspire for higher grading in cleanliness. The Swachh Survekshan survey run by the SBM Urban for the past three years has successfully built up a spirit of healthy competition among cities, vying with each other every year to improve their ranking as compared to other cities. The distinctive feature of Star Rating System will be that many cities can have higher stars as compared to only one city can be “Cleanest city” under Swachh Survekshan.
