Why in News?
The Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MOHUA) has released the results of the Swachh Survekshan League 2020 recently.
What is Swachh Survekshan?
- The Swachh Survekshan is the world's largest cleanliness survey which covers more than 4370 Indian cities.
- It was rolled out 4 years ago as the answer to a problem that municipal law failed to solve.
- It is a completely digitized and paperless survey.
What is the survey’s purpose?
- Sanitation and public health are responsibilities of State governments.
- It is no secret that they have spectacularly failed at managing growing volumes of municipal and hazardous waste.
- The problem has only been compounded by the absence of plans that take a holistic view of housing, sanitation, water supply, waste management and transport.
What did the MOHUA do?
- Ahead of the launch of Swachh Survekshan 2020, the Union MOHUA is trying to stir up competition among cities.
- It stirs up by pre-ranking them for their performance during 2019 and assigning points to be added this year.
- As an idea, unleashing the competitive spirit among States may seem appealing.
- But in reality, the problems confronting urban India require large-scale infrastructure creation, full adherence to legal requirements on waste management, and transparent technical audits.
- Many cities remain clueless on handling their waste.
- Bhopal, which figures among the top 5 cleanest cities under the just-released list, continues to live with the effects of the gas disaster of 1984.
- Ranks and prizes clearly cannot solve the national waste management crisis.
What are the targets fixed by the MOHUA?
- Looking ahead to the next edition of the Survekshan, the MOHUA has identified ambitious targets like,
- 100% processing and safe disposal of waste.
- Complete faecal sludge and septage management and
- Wastewater treatment and reuse.
- The Ministry has also sanctioned funds under the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) to help States set up facilities necessary to manage waste.
What could be done?
- States should ask for extended funding under such schemes to create the infrastructure for a future-focused clean-up.
- Simultaneously, they should institute measures to reduce waste.
- The emphasis worldwide is on creating a circular economy centred at the principle of material recovery from all kinds of waste, reuse, recycling and reduced pressure on natural resources.
- A sound ranking of cities and towns would naturally give the highest weightage to this dimension of sustainable management, replacing symbolism with an environmentally sound approach.
- Such rigour in policy formulation can make the Centre’s goal of eliminating single-use plastic by 2022 seem more realistic, and industry would find a compelling reason to switch to alternatives.
- Retooling Swachh Survekshan 2020 to go beyond perception management and adopt sustainability is essential to make it a genuine contest.
Source: The Hindu
