Bhubaneswar: Odisha cities are dirty.
At least dirtier compared to over hundred cities in the country. That is what indicates a national survey by the union housing and urban affairs ministry(MoHUA).
The ministry, while announcing the list of garbage free cities for the year 2019-20, has certified 6 cities as 5- Star, 65 cities as 3 -Star and 70 cities as 1-Star.
However, not a single city of Odisha figured in the Star rated 141 cities in the country.
For the assessment year 2019-2020, a total of six cities have been certified as 5-Star. The cities are Ambikapur(Chhattisgarh), Rajkot (Gujarat) Surat (Gujarat), Mysuru (Karnataka) , Indore (Madhya Pradesh) and Navi Mumbai (Maharastra). Besides, there were 65 cities which were certified as 3-Star and 70 cities as 1-Star.
Cities of Maharastra, Chhattishgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat dominated the the list of 65 3-Star list, while maximum number of cities of Maharastra, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh have found place in the 1-Star list of cities.
The list of Star certified cities were released by the union minister of state, Hardeep S. Puri, on Tuesday.
As many as 1435 cities in the country had applied for the recent phase of Star Rating Assessment. While 698 cities cleared the desktop assessment, 141 cities have been certified with Star Rating during field assessment
During the assessments, 1.19 crore citizen feedbacks and over 10 lakh geo-tagged pictures were collected and 5175 solid waste processing plants were visited by 1210 field assessors.
According to MHUA secretary Durga Shankar Mishra, ” The Star Rating Protocol was launched by the ministry in January 2018 to institutionalize a mechanism for cities to achieve Garbage Free status, and to motivate cities to achieve higher degrees of cleanliness.”
