Swachh Survekshan 2025-26 awards on 11 November: how the survey scored over 4,751 cities

The assessment has 43 indicators across 10 areas. The areas the ministry lists are segregation of waste, collection and transportation of waste, solid waste management, visible cleanliness, access to sanitation, mechanisation of desludging services, strengthening of institutions and ecosystems, management of used water, advocacy for cleanliness, and the welfare of sanitation workers, along with citizen feedback and grievance redressal. A city's score is a combination of what assessors saw on the ground, what the city documented, and what residents said.

What is new in the 2025-26 edition

The ministry names five changes this year.

• More weight on citizen feedback.
• Wider coverage of urban river fronts, coastlines and water bodies.
• Indicators on preventing open defecation and open urination.
• Cleanliness of tourist and heritage hotspots.
• Behaviour-change initiatives in schools.

The first change matters most for ranking. Weighting residents' views more heavily means that a city with good infrastructure but poor feedback can fall, and one with visible effort and satisfied residents can rise.

Swachh Shehar Jodi and the awards

Alongside the rankings, the ministry will recognise the top performers in Swachh Shehar Jodi, a city-to-city mentorship that Manohar Lal launched on 27 September 2025. It pairs 70 mentor cities with 191 mentee cities across 33 states and union territories, as a peer-learning programme on urban waste management.

The ministry reports how the mentee cities improved between the 2024 survey and the 2025-26 survey, as cumulative scores.

These are the ministry's own figures, and the notice does not say how the scores were calculated or which cities were included in the comparison. Source segregation, at 30%, remains the weakest area among the mentee cities, with waste separated at the household level in less than a third of the measure. That is a reminder that the awards reward the best performers while the average city still has work to do.

The ministry's notice does not list the award categories. Reports from Chhattisgarh say that Raipur, Bilaspur and Bilha were selected for national awards, which suggests that recognition extends beyond the top few cities, but the full list will come only from the ceremony. For readers who want the result, the ministry's Swachh Survekshan website and the Press Information Bureau will publish the official list once the awards are announced.

The survey sits within the Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban), which began in 2014 and runs a set of certifications alongside the annual ranking, among them ratings for cities as free of open defecation and as garbage free. The yearly Swachh Survekshan is the part that ranks cities against each other. At the awards for the previous edition, held in July 2025, the recognised cities included a group called the Super Swachh League, made up of cities that had repeatedly topped the rankings, and reports from that ceremony named Indore, Surat and Navi Mumbai among the leaders, though accounts of the exact order differed.

For residents, the survey is not only a prize list. Because citizen feedback and grievance redressal are among the scored areas, a city's result depends in part on whether residents were asked, and whether complaints were answered. The ministry encourages people to take part in the feedback exercise each year, and the weight given to it has gone up in this edition. Once the awards are announced, the full list of cities and their scores is the more useful document than the headline names, because it shows which areas pulled a city's score down, such as segregation at source or the treatment of used water.