Friday, 12 January 2024 | PNS | DEHRADUN
Uttarakhand got 19th position out of 27 states that participated in Swachch Survekshan 2023.The State has witnessed a decline in its performance as it received only two awards in SS23 compared to the six it received last year. A total of 446 cities participated in SS23 under the category ‘Cities with more than one lakh population’. The theme of SS23 was ‘Waste to Wealth’ and Dehradun with 6,579 points and Rudrapur with 1,798 points were declared to be the cleanest and dirtiest cities of the State. According to the data released on Thursday by the Central government, Dehradun, Haridwar, Roorkee and Haldwani got 68th, 176th, 180th and 211th positions respectively. Besides this, Rishikesh, Kotdwar, Kashipur and Rudrapur got 304th, 305th, 348th and 417th respectively. The experts have called these rankings quite disappointing and emphasised that the government and authorities concerned need to make more prominent efforts to bring a considerable change in the sanitation condition of the State. The activist and founder of the Dehradun-based Social Development for Communities (SDC) Foundation Anoop Nautiyal said that as per official data, the State’s door-to-door collection rate is 70 per cent, garbage processing efficiency rate is 26 per cent and source segregation rate is only 17 per cent. He opined that this data might also need to be rechecked considering the recent sanitation related scandals in Dehradun. Nautiyal said that a total of 88 Urban Local Bodies (ULB) participated in Swachch Survekshan this year and the State got 19th position in the country which is quite a disappointment for all. Indore and Surat were jointly declared as the cleanest cities in the country. He said that if Surat can be declared the cleanest city in the country despite being hit severely by plague 30 years ago, what is preventing Uttarakhand from doing better in every cleanliness survey? “Being the tourism oriented State, the government and administration here must heavily emphasise on cleanliness and associated issues. They must make genuine, honest and effective efforts to bring considerable changes in cleanliness practices across the State at the ground level. The public will also provide their support to honest efforts and hard work of administration,” Nautiyal said.
