Cleanest cities: what Indore's eighth title teaches

Swachh Survekshan is the world's largest urban sanitation survey, run annually by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs under the Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban), which was launched in 2016. The results of its ninth edition, Swachh Survekshan 2024-25, were announced on 17 July 2025 at Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi, with President Droupadi Murmu presenting the awards. Indore in Madhya Pradesh retained the title of India's cleanest city for the eighth consecutive year, followed by Surat in Gujarat and Navi Mumbai in Maharashtra. A total of 78 awards were announced across categories, and the edition evaluated more than 4,500 cities across 10 parameters and 54 indicators, covering sanitation, waste management, service delivery, and citizen feedback.

Indore's streak, beginning in 2017, is not an accident of ranking but the result of a system. The city segregates waste at source, processes it, and has cleared the Devguradia landfill, once 100 acres holding 13 lakh metric tons of waste, becoming described as India's first zero-landfill city. Its model depends on the municipal corporation, the state government, and the city's residents working together, with door-to-door collection, citizen feedback as a scored parameter, and a waste-to-wealth approach that treats processing as infrastructure rather than as an afterthought.

The rankings also show that “cleanest” depends on category. In the million-plus cities category, Indore, Surat, and Navi Mumbai led, while in the 3-to-10-lakh population category, Noida emerged as cleanest, followed by Chandigarh and Mysuru. Lucknow placed third among cities with populations over one million in the Swachh Shahar awards, with a reported score of 12,001 out of 12,500, driven by citizen-centric metrics such as public feedback and on-ground cleanliness. The 2024-25 theme was “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle”, which signals a shift from collection alone toward waste reduction.

The lesson for other cities is institutional rather than cosmetic. Rankings reward systems that survive changes of mayor and commissioner: segregated collection, processing capacity, landfill remediation, and citizen feedback loops. A city that cleans for a survey week will not hold a title for eight years, and a city that builds processing plants but ignores citizen behaviour will not score on feedback. Indore's record is therefore best read as evidence that urban sanitation is a governance routine, not a campaign.