Navi Mumbai cleanest city: Swachh Survekshan 2025-26 ends Indore's eight-year run

Navi Mumbai has been named India's cleanest city in Swachh Survekshan 2025-26, the national cleanliness survey run by the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. President Droupadi Murmu presented the awards at Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi on Wednesday, 11 November 2026. Navi Mumbai came first in the Super Swachh League, ahead of Surat and Vijayawada, while Indore, which had held the cleanest-city title for eight years in a row, did not finish in the top three.

Swachh Survekshan is the yardstick the Centre uses to measure how well cities handle garbage collection, waste processing, sanitation and public toilets under the Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban). A high rank brings national recognition to a municipal body, and the survey's scoring pushes city governments to spend on door-to-door collection, waste segregation and processing plants rather than only on street sweeping.

The Super Swachh League was introduced in the 2024-25 edition and is ranked separately from the population-based categories. That is why one city can top the league while another, such as Visakhapatnam, tops the million-plus category in the same year. For Navi Mumbai, the result is a climb from third place a year earlier to first. The city's civic body is the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation, and its commissioner, Kailas Shinde, credited the result to residents and sanitation workers, calling it a collective achievement.

The change at the top also marks the end of a long run for Indore. The Madhya Pradesh city had been ranked the cleanest in the country for eight straight years. This year it appears in the mentor-city pairing with Depalpur, a smaller town, rather than among the league's top three.

The new categories widen the survey's focus beyond population size. Riverfront towns, coastal towns and Himalayan cities face problems that ordinary rankings do not capture: waste washing into rivers, plastic on beaches, and the cost of collecting garbage on hill slopes. Puri in Odisha topped the coastal list, Rewa in Madhya Pradesh the riverfront list and Rudrapur in Uttarakhand the Himalayan list. At the ceremony, the President stressed citizen participation, behavioural change and accountability in administration, and suggested that issues such as plastic waste management be brought into school curricula.

Peepals calculation: The survey now covers about 65 times as many cities as in its first year (4,751 against 73), and the 2.70 crore citizen responses work out to an average of roughly 5,700 responses for each city assessed (2,70,00,000 / 4,751 = about 5,683). Our calculation from the reported figures.

Short-term: The winning municipal bodies receive national recognition, and state governments are already marking their own cities' results, such as Guwahati being recognised as Assam's top city and Raipur and Bilaspur winning awards for Chhattisgarh.

Long-term: Because the survey now reaches 4,751 cities and adds categories for rivers, coasts and hills, smaller towns are measured against peers with similar conditions rather than against large metros. Over time this gives district towns a clearer benchmark for waste and sanitation services, and gives state governments ranked data on where those services lag.

Who is affected: Residents of the ranked cities and towns, municipal corporations and councils, sanitation workers, state urban development departments, and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, which runs the survey under the Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban).

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