The clean cities ranking that the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs released on Thursday – Swachh Sarvekshan 2020 – puts Coimbatore at the 40th place in the list of 47 cities with over 10 lakh population.
The current year’s ranking is the same as that of last year. The Swachh Sarvekshan is an annual ranking exercise in cleanliness and sanitation that the ministry undertakes to rank cities and towns on various criteria for 6,000 marks.
For the 40th rank, the ministry awarded Coimbatore 2,337.12 marks. The cleanest city – Indore, Madhya Pradesh – had scored 5,647.56 marks. The Ministry had divided the 6,000 marks in four categories of 1,500 marks each. Coimbatore’s score in the first category – Service Level Progress – was 663.22, in the second category - Direct Observation – was 842, in the third category – Citizen Feedback – was 831.79, and in the fourth category – Certification – it was zero.
The national average score for the first, second, third and fourth categories was 306.24, 232.44, 819.98 and 855.72 respectively.
Sources in Coimbatore Corporation that were familiar with the preparation for Swachh Sarvekshan 2020 and the result said the civic body letting the city down was not unexpected as right at the time of submitting its achievements for last year, it skipped furnishing details under the ‘Certification’ category. And, it was forced to do so because it had not made any significant progress in both Garbage Free City (GFC) and Open Defecation Free (ODF) components that make up the ‘Certification’ category. As for GFC, the ministry had devised a star ranking system, awarding each city marks based on the starts it bagged.
Likewise, in ODF it measured the progress made in construction of individual household toilets, community toilets and public toilets and factored in the cleanliness, ambience, accessibility, etc. That the Coimbatore Corporation did nothing more than showcase two public toilets as model toilets – the one near Kattoor Police Station on Dr. Nanjappa Road and the second near its North Zone office on Balasundaram Road – and ignored the rest had reflected in the marks it scored, the sources explained.
An officer said with the ministry making Swachh Bharat Mission and Swachh Sarvekshan exercise a round-the-clock affair, civic bodies could no longer get away with last-minute dressing up like what the Coimbatore Corporation used to do in January-February every year by placing placards or cleaning toilets or sweeping roads.
The corporation had the wherewithal and resources to take Coimbatore to a place in the 10 cleanest cities in the country but poor supervision, slow progress in initiatives and lack of manpower remained its undoing, the officer added.