The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) has released the Star rating of garbage-free cities for the assessment year 2019-2020.

Practice question for mains:

Q. Discuss how the Swachh Bharat Mission has become a people’s movement in India. Also, discuss how it has managed to instill a behavioural change amongst the citizens.

About Star Rating Protocol

• The Star Rating Protocol was launched by the MoHUA in January 2018 to institutionalize a mechanism for cities to achieve Garbage Free status and to motivate cities to achieve higher degrees of cleanliness.
• The protocol has been devised in a holistic manner including components such as the cleanliness of drains & water bodies, plastic waste management, managing construction & demolition waste, etc.
• While the key thrust of this protocol is on Solid waste management(SWM), it also takes care of ensuring certain minimum standards of sanitation through a set of prerequisites defined in the framework.
• The new protocol considers ward-wise geo-mapping, monitoring of SWM value chain through ICT interventions like Swachh Nagar App and zone-wise rating in cities with a population above 50 lakh.

Performance of cities

• Accordingly, as per the 2020 survey, 6 cities have been graded 5 stars, 65 Cities rated 3 Star and 70 Cities rated 1 Star.

5 Star Cities

Assessment under the protocol

• To ensure that the Protocol has a SMART framework, the MoHUA has 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 MoHUA.
• Claims of cities that clear the desktop assessment are then verified through independent field-level observations in the third stage.

Significance

• This certification is an acknowledgement of the clean status of Urban Local Bodies and strengthened SWM systems as well as a mark of trust and reliability akin to universally known standards.

Back2Basics: Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM)

• SBM is a nation-wide campaign in India for the period 2014 to 2019 that aims to clean up the streets, roads and infrastructure of India’s cities, towns, urban and rural areas.
• The objectives of Swachh Bharat include eliminating open defecation through the construction of household-owned and community-owned toilets and establishing an accountable mechanism of monitoring toilet use.
• Run by the GoI, the mission aims to achieve an “open-defecation free” (ODF) India by 2 October 2019, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi by constructing 90 million toilets in rural India.
• The mission will also contribute to India reaching Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6), established by the UN in 2015.
• It is India’s largest cleanliness drive to date with three million government employees and students from all parts of India participating in 4,043 cities, towns, and rural areas.
• The mission has two thrusts: Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (“gramin” or ‘rural’), which operates under the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation; and Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (‘urban’), which operates under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.

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