Kanpur takes a big leap in Swachh Survekshan 2020

Kanpur: Taking a big leap in Swachh Survekshan 2020 rankings, Kanpur rose to 25thall-India position, registering an improvement by 38 notches in a year.
Concerted and sustained efforts to improve cleanliness over the last year helped Kanpur beat 38 cities to claim 25th rank, up from 63rd spot in 2019.
Kanpur was on 68th position in the Swachh rankings of 2018.
Union urban development minister Hardeep Singh Puri released the rankings of cities under Swachhta Survekshan on Thursday afternoon.
Officials were curious to know the ranking of the city and were elated to know that Kanpur had bagged 25th rank with 3,783.88 points.
Among the cities in UP, Kanpur got fifth place while Lucknow bagged the top position, while Agra, Ghaziabad and Prayagraj got second, third and fourth places respectively.
Kanpur mayor Pramila Pandey expressed happiness over the rise in ranking and said it was a big achievement but still more improvement can be done.
“Our hard work has borne fruits this is not all. My target is to make my city number one and I will make every effort to achieve that,” she said.
Pandey told TOI, “We worked very hard and had launched several cleanliness drives including the 12 hours’ continuous cleaning. We are happy with the results. If the city is cleaned then the citizens too would be healthy.”
Municipal commissinor Akshay Tripathi was also happy with Kanpur’s ranking and said, “There is still a lot of scope for improvement. We can do better. Door to door garbage collection and disposal of garbage will be channelized in a better way. We scored less in these two areas and can get more marks.”
Kanpur Cantonment, however, could not retain its position and was placed 48th in overall ranking. Meerut, Varanasi, Jhansi and Lucknow cantonments have better rankings than Kanpur.
The historical township of Bithoor got second place in the state.
It was the world’s largest cleanliness survey under which 4,242 cities were covered.
The Union urban development ministry said it was a time-bound nationwide survey spread over 28 days.
The surveyors captured more than 24 lakhs geotagged photos from the field and around 1.9 crores citizens gave their feedback. The most interesting thing was that the survey was completely digitized and paperless.
Indore created a record by winning the title of cleanest city for the fourth time in a row with 5,647.56 points.
Surat and Navi Mumbai secured second and third positions respectively.