New Delhi, November 9, 2026 (Yes Punjab News)
President Droupadi Murmu will confer awards recognising India’s cleanest cities at the 10th edition of the Swachh Survekshan Awards 2025-26, celebrating urban local bodies and states for their contributions to cleanliness and waste management.
The awards ceremony will be held at Vigyan Bhawan in the presence of Union Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Manohar Lal and Minister of State Tokhan Sahu, according to an official statement issued on Monday.
This year’s edition will also recognise outstanding performers under the Swachh Shehar Jodi initiative, which promotes knowledge-sharing and cooperation between 70 mentor cities and 191 mentee cities across 33 states and Union Territories.
Launched by Manohar Lal on September 27, 2025, the initiative is designed as an urban waste management mentorship programme to help cities improve their performance through peer learning. Memorandums of Understanding were signed between the participating mentor and mentee cities at its launch.
Over the past decade, Swachh Survekshan has expanded considerably, growing from an assessment of 73 urban local bodies in 2016 to more than 4,751 cities in its latest edition.
For the 2025-26 assessment, urban local bodies were evaluated against 43 indicators across 10 key areas. The latest edition places greater emphasis on citizen feedback and expands assessments to urban riverfronts, coastlines and water bodies. It also includes indicators covering prevention of open defecation and urination, cleanliness at tourist and heritage sites, and behaviour-change initiatives in schools.
More than 3,000 trained assessors conducted on-ground evaluations across the country, supported by GPS-enabled monitoring. The assessment process, from evidence submission to verification, was carried out digitally and subjected to quality checks.
The awards mark a decade of the nationwide cleanliness survey and are intended to encourage cities and states to sustain improvements under the Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban.
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