Indore has retained its cleanest city tag in the clean India survey 2018. Before it was praised for its cleanliness drive in 2017, the city was just like any other urban city in India dealing with its mounting garbage problem. In 2016, the Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) was criticised by pollution control boards, green bodies and environmentalists for not treating its garbage properly.

This prompted the IMC to come up with various ways to tackle the problem. It began deploying more than 600 workers to clean the town and started providing door-to-door waste collection services to 4,81,000 households and 1,40,000 commercial units.

The IMC imposes a penalty on those who do not keep public facilities clean. “The corporation officials are so strict that for littering the city, the officials charge the residents and the shopkeepers a penalty between Rs 100 and Rs 1 lakh. This initiative of the IMC has changed the overall behaviour of the people and helped the IMC in improving municipal services," says Vipul Chafekar, a resident of Nanda Nagar, Indore.

The IMC collects 1200 metric tons per day of dry and wet waste from the city and transfers it to the trenching ground for further processing. The IMC's multiple initiatives in managing waste and the political support it got for it have resulted in making Indore a clean city. 

Here's the video that tells us Indore's success story.