Not So Clean: Ahmedabad, Surat Cheat to Top Swachh Bharat Ranking

A significant amount of irregularities were found in complaints registered on the Swachh Bharat App.

In December 2016, the SBM team had observed a significant amount of irregularities in complaints registered on the Swachh Bharat App.(Photo: PTI)

In a move to continue Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), the Swachh Bharat App was launched last year with the spirit of making the nation clean.

The app was introduced by the Ministry of Urban Development to address the civic issues in different areas.

The app lets citizens upload a picture of the concerned area and a complaint is lodged accordingly. The municipal corporations then have to resolve the issue within a time period to earn points.

One would have thought of it as a smart move, enabling the citizens to register civic complaints such as garbage pile-up, unclean public toilets and dead animals. However, the civic authorities got their hands dirty by resorting to unfair methods to manipulate the data recorded in the app.

Some cities, including Surat, Ahmedabad and Mumbai have been exposed for cheating. They apparently made their way to the top by fudging the number of complaints they received on the app.

While doing analysis of data collected on the Swachhata app, we found several unusual number of friends registering complaints on the forum [from the same number]. The purpose of the app is to get more and more citizen participation in making cities cleaner.

Swachh Bharat Mission Director

(Photo: TheQuint)

“The act of some municipal corporations was not as per the motto of mission and with this, ground reality will not change,” he added.

The data also revealed multiple downloads of the app on a single mobile phone.

All the municipal corporations were warned by the SBM officials against such practice and were threatened to be marked negative in rankings if they continue to indulge in unfair practice.

The other municipal corporations that are on SBM’s radar for manipulating complaints include Pune, Navsari, Deoghar, Varanasi, Bilaspur, Tiruppur, Godhara, Rajkot, Vapi, Mysore and Ranchi.

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(Source: Mid-day)