"Cleanliness is not merely aesthetics but an indicator of administrative accountability." Examine this in the context of Swachh Survekshan.

At the Swachh Survekshan Awards 2025-26, the President described cleanliness as a sign of health, social consciousness and administrative accountability, not just how public spaces look [1]. The survey began in 2016 as a pilot covering 73 cities and is now the world's largest urban cleanliness survey [2]. It turns accountability into something that can be measured, but it captures only part of it.

Cleanliness as a mirror of accountability

• Core municipal duty: Under the 74th Amendment (12th Schedule), solid waste management is a function of urban local bodies (ULBs). A clean city therefore shows whether its ULB is doing its basic job.
• Public scorecard: Annual rankings make sanitation performance visible to everyone. This creates competition between cities and peer pressure on them [2].
• Answerability to citizens: Citizen feedback and regular dialogue with RWAs, women and youth build trust and transparency. Citizens are "the best judges" of how clean their surroundings are [1].
• Institutional readiness: Results depend on planning. CAG asked ULBs to prepare SWM plans and adopt byelaws [3], so cleanliness also tests how well a city is governed.

Where the indicator falls short

• Visible vs. processed waste: In 2021-22, Haryana's ULBs generated 8,766 tonnes of waste per day, but only 49% was processed [4]. A clean street can hide waste that is never treated.
• Legacy waste: About 2,476 dumpsites were identified when SBM-U 2.0 began [5]. In many cities, waste has been moved to the city edge rather than managed.
• Human cost: The score measures how clean a city is, not how it got clean. NAMASTE has reached 90,000+ septic-tank workers [6], which shows how many people still do hazardous cleaning work.
• Survey-centric effort: Rankings can encourage effort timed to the survey instead of sustained service.

Way forward

• Give more weight to verified processing and dumpsite remediation in the scoring.
• Under the proposed national framework for Tier-2/3 cities [1], make an approved SWM plan and byelaws a condition for receiving capacity funds [3].
• Link scores to mechanised cleaning done by NAMASTE-registered workers [6].
• Treat citizen complaints as service tickets, and publish ward-wise data on how quickly they are resolved [1].

Swachh Survekshan has made cleanliness a test of whether city governments deliver services and answer to citizens. If it looks beyond clean streets to waste processing, dumpsite clearance and worker safety, it could become a complete audit of accountability. That would advance SDG 6 and SDG 11 and the 74th Amendment's vision of empowered, answerable local government.