Global Lessons, Local Streets: How the Best Cities Stay Clean
- Neural City Team
- Sep 6
- 5 min read
Cleanliness is not an annual contest. It is a daily service.
Think of it like water supply or electricity: if the tap runs dry or the lights flicker, people notice immediately. Cleanliness is the same. A street swept yesterday but littered today does not feel “7-Star” to the resident walking to work.
The cities that truly excel are not those that shine during the Swachh Survekshan audit week, but those where the routine—the morning sweep, the predictable collection, the quick complaint redressal—never breaks stride.
We must acknowledge what India’s cleanliness rankings have accomplished already. A decade ago, civic discussions on cleanliness were rare. Today, Swachh Survekshan has put the cleanliness on the national stage. This visibility has created pressure on municipal leaders that simply did not exist earlier.
The next leap is simple but profound: to measure not just what is built and reported, but what citizens actually experience every single day.
What the best cities in India do differently
Indore: built discipline. Segregation at source is non-negotiable. Miss a route, or dump in the open, and the system corrects it the same day.
Surat: linked cleanliness to accountability. A complaint logged on its app is tracked like a customer service call—timed, followed up, escalated if missed.
Navi Mumbai: put workers first. Sanitation staff get better gear, mechanised sweepers, and training. The city treats them as frontline professionals, not invisible labour.
Together, these three practices—discipline, accountability, and dignity for workers—explain why these cities score high not only on paper but also in people’s eyes.
Metric | How global leaders do it | How India does it now | Why it matters |
Neighbourhood-level scores | NYC publishes monthly ratings by district | India publishes mostly city-level results | Residents live in wards, not averages. Local data keeps teams accountable. |
Detailed cleanliness types | England grades litter, debris, graffiti separately | India uses one broad “visible cleanliness” | Without detail, cities can’t target the right fix. |
Facility standards | Singapore sets clear toilet and facility rules, checked by mystery audits | India audits toilets, but less frequently and not always published | Women’s safety and dignity need strict, transparent standards. |
Public enforcement | Singapore uses corrective clean-up orders and hotspot blitzes | India fines exist but are not very visible | Behaviour changes faster when enforcement is seen. |
Continuous citizen signal | NYC 311 complaints, Singapore satisfaction surveys | Citizen feedback is only 4% of India’s score | Without weight, feedback doesn’t drive action. |
Frequency | NYC monthly, UK seasonal, Singapore regular blitzes | India annual | Cleanliness is a daily service, not an annual event. |
What the world’s best do
Singapore
Standards + Audits + Visible Enforcement
SG Clean campaign launched Feb 2020: a national hygiene quality mark tied to checklists for premises; scaled rapidly across malls, hawker centres, schools and transport hubs.
Mandatory Environmental Sanitation Regime (from 2021): codifies cleaning schedules, supervisor roles, and audit trails for higher-risk premises (schools, eldercare, hawkers).
2024 “Year of Public Hygiene”: more than 100 hotspot blitzes, Corrective Work Orders (CWO) done in public, and CCTV scale-up at litter hotspots. Under a CWO Offenders who repeatedly litter are sentenced by the court to perform cleaning work in public places (like picking up litter in parks or streets).
How it runs
Premises get checklisted audits to retain the SG Clean mark; lapses can trigger remediation or suspension.
CWOs for repeat litterers (introduced 1992; refreshed for visibility) create social deterrence.
Outcome data
Independent Public Cleanliness Satisfaction Survey (PCSS 2023) shows high satisfaction with public spaces and rising toilet satisfaction; still pushes for stronger citizen responsibility.
Success factors (Adaptable)
Clear, published minimum standards per facility type.
Mystery-style audits + consequences (lose the mark, or corrective action).
Public-facing enforcement keeps behaviour sticky.
England (Keep Britain Tidy):
Statistically robust street sampling
The Local Environmental Quality Survey of England (LEQSE) matured in the 2000s: national method to sample litter, detritus, graffiti, fly-posting across land-use classes.
How it runs
Councils (and central govt) use structured, geo-stratified samples—tens of thousands of site observations annually in some years—to grade acceptability and diagnose where/what to fix. keepbritaintidy.org
Outcome data
2017–18 national survey (25 authorities) reported 86% sites acceptable, with granular breakdowns by land-use and deprivation index to target spend.
Success factors (Adaptable)
Independently repeatable sampling frame (not a one-off audit).
Issue-specific scores (litter vs detritus vs graffiti) drive the right operational fix.
Built to be budget-agnostic: clipboard-to-app workflows scale up or down.
New York City
Monthly Scorecards + Public SLAs
Scorecard street/sidewalk cleanliness inspections date back to the 1970s; ratings appear monthly and in the Mayor’s Management Report (MMR).
Recent moves: containerization rules, citywide organics expansion, and staffing updates reflected in the FY2024 PMMR.
How it runs
Independent inspectors grade blockfaces; results published by community district. Residents and media can compare neighbourhoods, not just citywide averages.
311 tracks dirty-condition complaints and response times, joining the dots between scorecards and SLA-style service.
Success factors (Adaptable)
Sub-city transparency (borough/district)—keeps pressure where people live.
Monthly cadence makes slippage visible fast.
Complaints + inspection data in one public narrative.
India’s scorecard blind spot
India’s Swachh Survekshan 2024–25 modernised the toolkit and upped the total to 12,500 points. But the weighting under-prices what citizens actually feel.
What’s in (big weights)
Four-Phase Assessment – 10,000 (80%): a broad, largely municipal-process block.
Certifications – 2,500 (20%): GFC star + ODF/Water+.
What’s shrunk
Citizen Feedback + Grievance together are 500 points (4%) inside the 10,000 block (no longer a standalone “23%” pillar as in 2023).
“Visible cleanliness” is 1,500 inside the 10,000 (15%), but it’s sample-based by assessors—not continuous citizen audits.
Where gaps persist
Voice vs verification: citizen satisfaction is episodic and low-weight; mystery user checks of Community Toilets (CTs)/Public Toilets (PTs) aren’t institutionalised at scale.
Sub-city truth: citywide scores mask ward-level variation; NYC-style neighbourhood publishing is rare.
Issue-specific cleanliness: India’s audits aggregate “visible cleanliness”; LEQSE-style decomposed indicators (litter vs detritus vs graffiti) are limited, reducing diagnostic power.
Enforcement visibility: penalties exist on paper, but Singapore-style public CWOs and hotspot blitzes aren’t a norm; deterrence remains weak.
Publication cadence: annual contests dominate the narrative; monthly, ward-level dashboards (cleanliness + SLA) are the exception.
What India can do next
Ward-level, monthly “Two-Track” dashboards
Track A (Capacity): collection coverage, Material Recovery Facility (MRF) uptime, Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) and Faecal Sludge Treatment Plant (FSTP) compliance.
Track B (Experience): litter transect scores, Community Toilets (CTs)/Public Toilets (PTs) mystery audits, complaint closures & re-opens.Publish both—like NYC does for districts.
LEQSE-lite sampling kit
A 60–100-site stratified sample (markets, schools, tourist nodes, residential) run monthly; grade litter/detritus/graffiti separately.
Start on paper, move to a simple mobile app.
CT/PT dignity standard
Minimums for light, privacy, bins, menstrual hygiene; mystery audits every month; publish ratings outside the facility—Singapore style.
Hotspot deterrence calendar
Publish a weekly enforcement + cleanup schedule for recurring black-spots; pilot a visible “corrective cleanup” for chronic offenders at markets (India-appropriate adaptation of CWO).
Citizen signal back at 20% (locally)
Even if national weights lag, a city can self-adopt a 20% internal weight for citizen satisfaction + SLA, and hold contractors to it.
Closing thought
Cleanliness is one of the most visible public services a city can deliver. It shapes how residents trust their government far more than a certificate or a ranking ever will.
Indore has shown that consistency can make a city truly feel clean. Singapore, London, and New York have shown that cleanliness can be measured, enforced, and improved at scale.
The lesson for India is not to copy these cities or spend like them, but to borrow the methods that work: publish local results regularly, track different problems separately, make enforcement visible, and give real weight to citizen feedback.
That is how cities move from being clean on paper to being clean every day.
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