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Modi's Varanasi Is Among The 10 Dirtiest Cities In India

Modi's Varanasi Is Among The 10 Dirtiest Cities In India
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, center, sweeps an a road with a broom along with civic workers in New Delhi, India, Thursday, Oct. 2, 2014. Modi joined millions of schoolchildren, officials and ordinary people who picked up brooms and dustpans Thursday in a countrywide campaign to clean parks, public buildings and streets. (AP Photo/Press Trust of India)
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, center, sweeps an a road with a broom along with civic workers in New Delhi, India, Thursday, Oct. 2, 2014. Modi joined millions of schoolchildren, officials and ordinary people who picked up brooms and dustpans Thursday in a countrywide campaign to clean parks, public buildings and streets. (AP Photo/Press Trust of India)

NEW DELHI -- Prime Minister Narendra Modi's constituency of Varanasi appears to have ignored his exhortations of everyone coming together to rid India of its filth. The holy city in the Uttar Pradesh, which heaped electoral glory on the leader from Gujarat in 2014, is ranked among the country's ten dirtiest cities.

A survey to check the impact of Modi's Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, a nationwide campaign for public bodies and civilians to be more proactive about keeping their localities clean, reveals that Mysore in Karnataka, Chandigarh, and Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu are the cleanest cities in India, while Dhanbad in Jharkand is the dirtiest.

The survey was conducted in 73 cities with more than 10 lakh residents by Quality Council of India.

The 10 dirtiest cities in India are: Kalyan Dombivilli in Maharashtra, Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, Jamshedpur in Jharkhand, Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, Raipur in Chhattisgarh, Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, Patna in Bihar, Itanagar in Arunachal Pradesh, Asansol in West Bengal and Dhanbad in Jharkhand.

While campaigning for the 2014 national election in Uttar Pradesh, Modi promised to usher in a new era of development in the state, which gave 71 seats to the BJP in the Lok Sabha, and he promised to clean the holy Ganga in his constituency of Varanasi.

All three of the dirtiest cities from Uttar Pradesh are led by the lawmakers from the Bharatiya Janata Party, The Economic Times pointed out.

When asked why Modi's constituency was so dirty, Urban Development Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu, who released the survey results on Monday, shifted blame to local authorities, ET reported.

"The local administration can best reply to this. If it has fared poorly, then the administration should work towards improvement," he said.

Naidu also said that 400 cities in India would be free from open defecation by the end of the year.

New Delhi, Vishakapatnam, Surat, Rajkot, Gangtok, Pimpri Chindwad, and Greater Mumbai are also among the ten cleanest cities.

The top 10 clean cities in the country in the order of merit are pic.twitter.com/UiVWsP87o7

— M Venkaiah Naidu (@MVenkaiahNaidu) February 15, 2016

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