Swachh Survekshan 2025-26 Results Announcement

1. At a Glance

• Swachh Survekshan (SS) is MoHUA's yearly national survey of urban sanitation, described as the world's largest. It ranks Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) on cleanliness and service delivery. 2025-26 is its 10th edition. [1]
• The 2025-26 cycle covered 4,751 ULBs on 176 sub-indicators grouped into 10 sections. It produced 60 national awards in 7 categories. [1]
• What is new: Swachh Shehar Jodi (SSJ) pairs a strong mentor city with a weaker mentee city. Each pair is ranked on its combined score, so the survey now rewards mentoring as well as a city's own cleanliness. [1]
• Why it matters for UPSC: it ties together urban governance (GS-II), solid waste management and environment (GS-III), and cooperative and competitive federalism. Prelims questions often test the numbers and category names.

2. Why in the News

• 11 November 2026: MoHUA announced the Top 3 Swachh Shehar Jodi pairs. [1]
• President Droupadi Murmu then presented the SS 2025-26 awards in New Delhi. [1]
• SS 2025-26 theme: "Swachhata Ki Nayi Pehel – Badhayein Haath, Karein Safai Saath". It stresses collective action. [1]

3. Background & Evolution

• Parent mission: Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (SBM-U), run by MoHUA. [4]
• 1 October 2021: the PM launched SBM-U 2.0 together with AMRUT 2.0 at Dr. Ambedkar International Centre, New Delhi. [3]
• SBM-U 2.0 aims: make cities "Garbage Free", completely free of garbage. [3] MoHUA's vision sets 2026 as the year for all cities to reach "Garbage Free" status. [4]
• SBM-U 2.0 duration: 5 years from 1 October 2021. [4]

• Inference: that window ends in late 2026, so SS 2025-26 is the last survey inside SBM-U 2.0's stated period.

• 17 July 2025: the SS 2024-25 awards were held. Indore was ranked first in the Super Swachh League, >10 lakh population category. [2]

• 27 September 2025: Union Minister Shri Manohar Lal launched Swachh Shehar Jodi. Mentor and mentee cities were chosen from the SS 2024-25 rankings. [1]
• November 2026: SS 2025-26, the 10th edition, gave out the first SSJ awards. [1]
• SS has run since roughly the mid-2010s; this follows from "10th edition". The exact first year and the original city count were not checked in this round's sources.

4. Core Static Facts

The 7 award categories [1]

1. Swachh Shehar Jodi
2. Top 3 Clean Cities (cities that already won under SSJ are excluded)
3. Swachh Shehar, by population category
4. Swachh River Front Town
5. Swachh Coastal Town
6. Clean Himalayan City
7. State/UT First Swachh City

Swachh Shehar Jodi (SSJ) [1]

• Peer-learning initiative under SBM-U 2.0, the first-ever mentorship scheme for urban waste management.
• Covers 70 mentor cities and about 191 mentee cities across 33 States/UTs.
• Each pair signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).
• Guiding principle: "Each One – Teach One", drawn from the Guru–Shishya tradition.
• Scoring: the mentor's and mentee's scores are added together. Only each mentor city's best-performing Jodi is counted.

5. Multi-Dimensional Analysis

Administrative / Governance

• One assessment framework covers 4,751 ULBs, so cities of very different sizes are measured the same way. Separate population, river-front, coastal and Himalayan categories keep the comparisons fair. [1]
• SSJ creates horizontal capacity building between cities through MoUs. Most earlier help flowed from the Centre down to cities. [1]
• The ban on SSJ winners also taking a Top 3 Clean Cities award stops one city collecting two prizes, so recognition reaches more cities. [1]

Ethical / Transparency

• GPS-enabled real-time monitoring, digital evidence and quality checks at every stage are meant to protect the credibility of the rankings and to limit gaming of scores. [1]
• Combined Jodi scoring builds in an incentive to help others. A mentor cannot win on its own score. [1]

Environmental

• SS is the measuring tool for SBM-U 2.0's goal of Garbage-Free cities by 2026. [3][4]
• The River Front Town and Coastal Town categories link urban cleanliness to keeping waste out of rivers and the sea. [1]
• The Clean Himalayan City category reflects how fragile mountain ecosystems and towns under tourist pressure are. [1]

Social

• The theme, "Badhayein Haath, Karein Safai Saath", presents sanitation as a shared citizen duty, not only a municipal service. [1]
• Mentor cities share knowledge with weaker mentee cities, many of them smaller. This can narrow the gap between cities in service levels. [1]

Federal (cooperative and competitive)

• Rankings set cities against each other (competitive federalism), while SSJ pairs them up (cooperative federalism). The pairs span 33 States/UTs. [1]
• The State/UT First Swachh City award gives every State/UT a winner, so the awards are not concentrated in a few high-performing States. [1]

6. Recent Developments (last 12-18 months)

• 17 July 2025: SS 2024-25 awards; Indore first in the Super Swachh League (>10 lakh). [2]
• 27 September 2025: Swachh Shehar Jodi launched by Shri Manohar Lal, with 70 mentor cities and about 191 mentee cities. [1]
• 2025-26: the 10th SS survey assessed 4,751 ULBs with over 3,000 field assessors. [1]
• 11 November 2026: MoHUA announced the Top 3 Swachh Shehar Jodi pairs. [1]
• November 2026: President Murmu presented the 60 national awards in New Delhi. [1]

7. Prelims Hooks

• SS 2025-26 is the 10th edition of Swachh Survekshan. [1]
• Implementing ministry: MoHUA, not the Ministry of Jal Shakti. [1]
• 4,751 ULBs were assessed in SS 2025-26. [1]
• The framework has 176 sub-indicators across 10 sections. [1]
• 60 national awards were given in 7 categories. [1]
• Over 3,000 trained field assessors carried out the on-ground survey. [1]
• Swachh Shehar Jodi was launched on 27 September 2025 by Shri Manohar Lal. [1]
• SSJ is described as the first-ever urban waste management mentorship initiative, under SBM-U 2.0. [1]
• SSJ covers 70 mentor cities and about 191 mentee cities from 33 States/UTs. [1]
• SSJ mentor and mentee cities were chosen using the SS 2024-25 rankings. [1]
• Jodi ranking uses the combined total score of mentor and mentee, and counts only the best Jodi per mentor city. [1]
• Cities that won under SSJ are excluded from the Top 3 Clean Cities category. [1]
• "Clean Himalayan City" is a named award category in SS 2025-26. [1]
• SBM-U 2.0 and AMRUT 2.0 were launched together on 1 October 2021. [3]
• SBM-U 2.0's vision is "Garbage Free" status for all cities by 2026. [4]

8. What a Clean Ranking Does Not Show: The Old Garbage Mountains

• A city can look clean on the street while old waste still sits at its dump
• Swachh Survekshan mostly checks how a city handles the waste it makes today: collection, cleaning, processing [1].
• Legacy waste is different. It is old garbage that has piled up for years at open dumpsites.

• By January 2026, PIB said only a little over 62% of this legacy waste had been processed. Work was still going on at 1,428 dumpsites [5].

• The 2026 'Garbage Free' target and the real numbers do not match

• SBM-U 2.0 aims for all cities to be 'Garbage Free' by 2026. Its five-year period ends in late 2026 [4].
• Ten months before that, close to 38% of legacy waste was still untreated [5].

• So the 10th edition's awards show who is best. They do not show that the mission's goal has been met.

• How to use this in an answer: say that rankings measure how cities do compared with each other. They do not measure distance from the target. A city can come first while the national goal is still missed.

9. Why Money Sent to Cities Does Not Become Working Plants

• Plants get built but are never switched on
• The CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General, India's top government auditor) audited solid waste management in Uttar Pradesh's cities [6].
• 36 processing plants were sanctioned under SBM-Urban in 2021-22. Civil work (the building part) was finished on 19, but these could not be made to work [6].

• The money became a building, not a service.

• Most cities had no plan and no local rules

• Only 3 of the 45 ULBs the CAG checked had made a Solid Waste Management plan [6].
• Only 12 had framed bye-laws (local rules a city makes, e.g., fines for littering) [6].

• In 43 of the ULBs checked, waste was still dumped in open sites [6].

• Cities could not spend the money they were given

• In Rajasthan, ULBs used only 20.69% of the SBM funds released to them for waste management in 2015-17 [7].

• The reason is weak staff and weak planning inside the city body, not a shortage of central money.

• Be careful with dates: the UP audit covers 2016 to 2022, and the Rajasthan audit covers SBM's first phase [6][7]. Use them to show a repeated pattern in how ULBs work, not as a picture of 2026.

• Why this matters for the ranking: a survey gives marks to results. It cannot fix a city that has no engineers, no plan and no bye-laws. That gap is a 74th Amendment issue. Sanctioning money is not the same as having the ability to use it.

10. How Jodi Scoring Could Leave Many Mentee Cities Behind

• Only one mentee per mentor counts for the award
• There are 70 mentor cities and about 191 mentee cities [1].
• Only each mentor's best-performing Jodi is counted in the ranking [1].

• So at most 70 mentees count towards an award. More than 100 mentee cities do not affect any score.

• This shapes what a mentor will do

• A mentor with three mentees gains most by putting its effort into the one most likely to improve.
• The weakest mentee, the one that most needs help, brings the mentor nothing in the ranking.

• The note says SSJ "builds in an incentive to help others". More exactly, it rewards helping one other city.

• What MoHUA could change in the next cycle

• Count the average of all of a mentor's Jodis, or its lowest one, so that no mentee is ignored.
• Give marks for how much a mentee improved from its SS 2024-25 score, the score that was used to choose it [1]. This rewards real progress, not a mentee that was already fairly strong.

11. What the Survey Should Measure After 2026

• MoHUA should give marks for working plants, not just built ones
• The CAG found plants in UP that were built but did not work [6].

• The survey already uses GPS checks on the ground and digital evidence [1]. The same field assessors could check whether a processing plant is actually running and how much waste it handles each day.

• MoHUA should show dumpsite progress city by city

• Legacy waste is reported as one national total (about 62% processed) [5].

• A separate score or public list for each city's old dumpsite would stop a city winning a 'clean' award while its dump is still standing.

• State Urban Development Departments should fix the planning gap first

• Most ULBs the CAG checked had no SWM plan and no bye-laws [6]. Both are needed under the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016.

• Making a plan and bye-laws a minimum entry condition for the survey would tie ranking to the basics the law already requires.

• The Centre should pay against results, not against sanctions

• Only 20.69% of funds were used in Rajasthan [7], and finished plants sat idle in UP [6]. Both show that releasing money does not ensure delivery.
• Linking later instalments of central money to a verified working plant, or to a cleared dumpsite, follows directly from these CAG findings.

12. Anchors for Answers

• Data: A little over 62% of India's legacy waste had been processed by January 2026, with remediation still going on at 1,428 dumpsites [5]
• Data: Rajasthan ULBs used only 20.69% of the SBM funds released for waste management in 2015-17 [7]
• Report/Committee: CAG Report No. 1 of 2025, Solid Waste Management in Uttar Pradesh. Only 3 of 45 ULBs checked had an SWM plan; 19 SBM-U plants were built but did not work; 43 ULBs still dumped waste in the open [6]
• Law/Case: 74th Constitutional Amendment, 12th Schedule (solid waste management is a municipal function); Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016
• Scheme: SBM-U 2.0, Garbage-Free City goal by 2026 and legacy dumpsite remediation [4][5]; Swachh Shehar Jodi (70 mentor cities, about 191 mentee cities; only the best Jodi per mentor counts) [1]

13. Mains Relevance

• GS-II: Government policies and interventions; functioning of local bodies (74th Amendment context); cooperative and competitive federalism.
• GS-III: Environment, including solid waste management and pollution; infrastructure and urbanisation.
• GS-IV: Collective responsibility, citizen duty, and transparency in public assessment.
• Possible question stems: 1. "Swachh Survekshan has evolved from a ranking exercise into a capacity-building instrument." Discuss with reference to the Swachh Shehar Jodi initiative. 2. Examine how competitive and cooperative federalism work together in India's urban sanitation governance. Are city rankings enough to sustain 'Garbage-Free' outcomes? 3. Critically evaluate how robust technology-enabled assessment is in national cleanliness surveys. What safeguards make such rankings credible?

14. Related Topics to Study Next

• SBM-U 2.0 (Garbage Free City star ratings, legacy dumpsite remediation): SS is the mission's main assessment tool.
• AMRUT 2.0: launched on the same day as SBM-U 2.0 and covers the urban water and sewerage side.
• Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016 / Plastic Waste Management Rules: the legal basis for what ULBs are graded on.
• 74th Constitutional Amendment and the 12th Schedule: ULBs are the units being ranked, and sanitation and SWM are municipal functions.
• SBM-Grameen / ODF Plus: the rural counterpart. Watch for MoHUA vs Jal Shakti confusion.
• Namami Gange / river-front development: linked to the Swachh River Front Town category.
• Ease of Living Index / Municipal Performance Index: other MoHUA city-ranking frameworks.
• Circular economy and Waste-to-Energy (e.g., GOBARdhan): the waste processing that sits behind cleanliness scores.

15. NCERT Concepts to Revise

• Swachh Survekshan (Polity): The annual cleanliness ranking of cities that is the subject of this article and its 10th edition.
• Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (Polity): Parent mission under which Swachh Survekshan and Swachh Shehar Jodi run, with the 2026 garbage-free goal.
• Urban local bodies (Polity): The 4,751 ULBs are the units ranked, and they must plan and run waste services.
• 74th Constitutional Amendment Act 1992 (Polity): Gave ULBs constitutional status and the sanitation and waste functions the note says many cities cannot perform.
• Competitive federalism (Polity): City rankings and awards make cities compete for better outcomes, as the note explains.
• Cooperative federalism (Polity): Swachh Shehar Jodi pairs strong and weak cities across States to learn from each other.
• Legacy waste (Geography): Old dumpsite waste is what a clean ranking misses; much of it was still unprocessed in 2026.
• Solid waste management (Economy): Core subject of the survey and SBM-U 2.0, covering collection, processing and disposal.
• Comptroller and Auditor General (Polity): CAG audits found idle plants and unspent funds in city bodies, as cited in the note.
• Performance audit (Polity): The CAG reports used here are performance audits judging whether waste programmes achieved their goals.
• AMRUT (Polity): AMRUT 2.0 was launched with SBM-U 2.0 and covers the urban water and sewerage side.
• Memorandum of Understanding (Polity): Each mentor-mentee city pair signed an MoU recording their cooperation under Swachh Shehar Jodi.
• Solid Waste Management Rules 2026 (Geography): Current legal framework for waste segregation and landfill limits that cities are graded against.

16. Common Errors / Trap Areas

• SS vs SSJ: SS is the survey and ranking. SSJ is a mentorship programme under SBM-U 2.0 that uses SS rankings. Do not call SSJ a survey. [1]
• Choosing the pairs vs scoring them: mentor and mentee cities were picked from SS 2024-25 rankings, but the Jodis were awarded in SS 2025-26. [1]
• Exclusion rule: SSJ winners are left out of Top 3 Clean Cities, not out of every category. [1]
• Ministry confusion: urban SS is MoHUA. Swachh Bharat-Grameen falls under the Ministry of Jal Shakti, so do not mix the two.
• Indicator counts vary by source: some secondary outlets give different figures (e.g., "43 indicators"). For Prelims, use the PIB figure of 176 sub-indicators in 10 sections. [1]
• Super Swachh League: Indore's top place in SS 2024-25 was in the Super Swachh League (>10 lakh), which is separate from the regular rankings. [2] Do not assume a 2025-26 winner without checking against PIB.