Why in News?

• Swachh Survekshan 2019, ODF+ & ODF ++ Protocols and Swachh Manch Web Portal
• Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs (MoHUA) is set to launch the Swachh Survekshan 2019.
• Parallelly, a slew of new initiatives under the SBM-Urban as well as the Ease of Living Index will also be launched.

Success of Swachh Bharat:

• The recently concluded Swachh Survekshan 2018 ranked 4,203 Cities.
• Swachh Survekshan has caught the imagination of citizens and stakeholder alike: in 2016, 1 lakh citizens provided their feedback in the survey.
• In 2017, nearly 20 lakh citizen feedback was received. 2018 garnered feedback from 38 lakh citizens, a milestone to the way in which the SBM has become an integral part of citizens’ mental maps.
• The survey has already succeeded in fostering a spirit of healthy competition among towns and cities to improve their service delivery to citizens, towards creating cleaner cities.

Highlights of Swachh Survekshan 2018:

• 79% of residents find their area cleaner than last year.
• 73,875 waste pickers provided formal livelihood.
• In 137 cities, > 60% of the bulk garbage generators are doing on-site composting.
• 33% cities of >1 lakh population have ICT based monitoring of their Community and Public Toilets.

Swachh Survekshan 2019:

• With an aim to increase the coverage of the ranking exercise MoHUA now proposes to conduct its fourth survey – Swachh Survekshan 2019 to rank all cities under Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (SBM-U).
• The distinctive features of the survey includes encouraging large scale citizen participation, ensuring sustainability of initiatives taken towards garbage free and open defecation free cities, providing credible outcomes which would be validated by third party certification etc.
• The Swachh Survekshan 2019 toolkit that will be launched will contain the detailed survey methodology and component indicators with scores to help cities to prepare themselves for taking the survey.

SBM ODF+ and ODF++ Protocol:

• The SBM ODF+ protocol focuses on sustaining community/ public toilet usage by ensuring their functionality, cleanliness and maintenance.
• The SBM ODF++ will focus on achieving sanitation sustainability by addressing complete sanitation value chain, including safe containment, processing and disposal of faecal sludge and septage.
• The ODF+ and ++ protocol and toolkit to be launched will detail out the necessary conditions to be achieved by cities for declaring themselves as ODF+ and ODF++, along with the detailed steps required for third party certifications.

Swachh Manch web portal:

• It is a web-based platform which aims to bring together every stakeholder contributing to the Swachh Bharat Mission under a common platform.
• It will allow stakeholders to create/invite/participate in volunteering opportunities around neighbourhoods.
• It will enable uploads of pictorial evidence of citizens and organizations participating in the initiatives, as well as record the number of hours volunteered, as acknowledgement of citizens’/organisations’ efforts and contributions to the cause of ‘swachhata’.
• The Swachh Manch will also be integrated with the existing Swachhata App to act as a citizens’ grievance redressal platform.

Ease of Living Index:

• The Ease of Living assessment standards are closely linked to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and will provide a strong impetus to India’s effort for systematic tracking progress of SDGs in the urban areas.
• It will also be launched along with an Ease of Living Index dashboard.
• Apart from presenting the overall national ranking of 111 cities, the dashboard will present ranking of the cities across pillars, category, geographical zone and population classifications.
• This framework comprises four pillars namely Institutional, Social, Economic and Physical which are further broken down into 15 categories and 78 indicators.
• The dashboard will also have a comparison feature that will allow users to analyse the performance across cities on various liveability parameters.