Puri has secured first place in the Clean Coastal City category at the Swachh Survekshan 2025–26 awards, while Bhubaneswar was recognised as Odisha’s top state-level clean city and Asika municipality ranked second among urban local bodies with populations between 20,000 and 50,000.
The awards were presented at a ceremony at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi on Wednesday. President Droupadi Murmu presented the honours, which were received on behalf of Odisha by Urban Development Minister Dr Krishna Chandra Mahapatra and Housing and Urban Development Department Additional Chief Secretary Usha Padhee.
The recognition places three Odisha urban centres among the notable performers in different categories of the national cleanliness assessment. Puri’s award relates specifically to the Clean Coastal City category, while Bhubaneswar’s recognition identifies it as the leading state-level clean city in Odisha. Asika’s second-place ranking was recorded in the 20,000–50,000 population category for urban local bodies.
Representatives from the state’s urban administration and participating civic bodies attended the event. Those present included Binay Kumar Dash, Special Secretary and Mission Director of the Swachh Bharat Mission–Urban; Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation Mayor Sulochana Das; the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation commissioner; representatives of the Puri civic body; and the chairperson and executive officer of Asika Municipality.
Swachh Survekshan 2025–26 was conducted under the Swachh Bharat Mission–Urban and marks the tenth edition of the national awards programme. The exercise is described as the world’s largest urban sanitation and cleanliness assessment programme. Its results are intended to compare urban local bodies and recognise performance across different population and city categories.
The 2025–26 edition was conducted under the theme ‘Swachhata Ki Nayi Pehel – Badhaayen Haath, Karein Safai Saath’, which focuses on citizen participation, institutional accountability and healthy competition between cities. The theme also marks a decade of changes in urban sanitation systems under the national cleanliness mission.
The awards recognise civic performance, but the supplied announcement does not provide the underlying scores, assessment indicators or category-wise rankings beyond the results for Puri, Bhubaneswar and Asika. It also does not specify the individual sanitation measures or municipal interventions that led to the three recognitions.
The immediate next step for the recognised urban local bodies will be to sustain the sanitation systems and institutional practices assessed through the Swachh Survekshan process. The awards ceremony in New Delhi formally concluded the announcement of the 2025–26 results for the participating Odisha representatives.
