When clean is not safe

Sanitation reform in Indian cities has delivered visible gains, yet its deepest challenge remains invisible: Aligning the pursuit of cleanliness with the harder task of protecting public health and environmental safety.

- AMIT KAPOOR

CONURBATION AMIT KAPOOR

Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (SBM-U) is one of the country’s most visible and successful urban programmes, and yet one that increasingly reveals the limits of outcome-agnostic cleanliness metrics.

The scale of the effort is commendable. What began in 2016 as a survey of cities with 73 million-plus people has now expanded into the world’s largest urban cleanliness assessment, with Swachh Survekshan 2024-25 ranking 4,589 cities across population categories.

This expansion has institutionalised sanitation as a core urban service rather than a peripheral welfare concern. However, the real question facing Indian cities today is whether the mission’s architecture is evolving fast enough from cleanliness and sanitation to systemic urban safety.

The mission's scale and behaviour-change ambition have been noted by multilaterals. An Asian Development Bank (ADB) programme document on SBM-U 2.0 argues that Swachh Survekshan has become an effective national tool for transforming city performance, and points to measurable shifts, such as ULB wards with 100 per cent source segregation rising from 15 per cent in 2021 to 89 per cent in 2023, and waste processing increasing from 18 per cent in 2014 to 76 per cent in 2023. Indore’s repeated top rankings have been underpinned by near-universal door-to-door waste collection, decentralised wet waste processing, and a strong feedback loop between citizens and the municipality.