The President of India will confer the Swachh Survekshan 2025-26 awards at Vigyan Bhawan on 11 November 2026. A decade after its launch, the survey is now as much a test of whether ranking-driven competition can sustain urban sanitation as it is a contest among cities.

• Waste chain: segregation, collection and transportation; solid waste processing and management.
• What citizens see: visible cleanliness; access to sanitation.
• Faecal and wastewater management: mechanisation of desludging services; used water management.
• Systems and people: ecosystem strengthening and institutional parameters; advocacy for Swachhata; welfare of sanitation workers; citizen feedback and grievance redressal.

Swachh Shehar Jodi was launched on 27 September 2025 by the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. It is described as the first urban waste-management mentorship and peer-learning programme. A high-performing mentor city is paired with a lagging mentee city, and every pair signed an MoU at launch.

• Scale: 70 mentor cities and 191 mentee cities across 33 States/UTs.
• Logic: knowledge moves horizontally, from city to city. Practices that already work locally (route planning, segregation drives, material recovery) are transferred, not just top-down guidelines.
• Recognition: top-performing pairs will be honoured alongside the cleanest cities in SS 2025-26.

• 2016: the first survey covered 73 cities; Mysuru was ranked cleanest.
• 2017–2023: coverage expanded rapidly to thousands of towns. Indore topped seven consecutive editions, sharing the top spot with Surat in SS 2023.
• Parallel certifications: ODF / ODF+ / ODF++ / Water+ protocols and the Garbage Free City (GFC) star rating (launched 2018) now feed into SS scores.
• SS 2024-25: introduced the Super Swachh League for consistently top-ranked cities (Indore, Surat, Navi Mumbai), so that other cities compete on a fresh field. Cities were also ranked within population categories.
• SS 2025-26: adds Swachh Shehar Jodi recognition and widens scope to water bodies, coastlines and heritage sites.

• Public health: poor sanitation drives diarrhoeal and vector-borne disease, which in turn are linked to child undernutrition and stunting.
• Urban governance: rankings create measurable accountability for ULBs, which are often weak on data and performance tracking.
• Circular economy: the focus on segregation and processing supports “waste to wealth”: composting, material recovery and waste-to-energy.
• Dignity of sanitation workers: indicators on mechanised desludging and worker welfare align with the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 and the NAMASTE scheme (2023).
• Jan Andolan: citizen feedback and school campaigns aim at behaviour change, the hardest and most durable part of sanitation.

• “Survey-season” cleanliness: rankings can reward visible cleanliness during the assessment window more than year-round systems.
• Collection ≠ processing: door-to-door collection has risen faster than scientific processing. Many cities still carry legacy dumpsites.
• Segregation lag: even mentee cities score only 30% on source segregation. This is the stage on which the entire downstream chain depends.
• Fiscal and capacity gaps: devolution under the 74th Amendment remains incomplete. Small ULBs depend on transfers and lack engineers and planners, so the ranking compares unequal starting points.
• Informal workers: mechanisation and formal contracts can displace informal waste pickers unless they are integrated into the system.
• Data integrity: self-submitted evidence and online citizen feedback can be gamed. The shift to GPS-tracked, digitally verified assessment is a response to this.

• Give more weight to processing outcomes and dumpsite remediation than to visible cleanliness.
• Tie Finance Commission and State Finance Commission grants to verified sanitation outcomes, and strengthen own-source revenue of ULBs (user charges, property tax).
• Make Swachh Shehar Jodi a permanent cluster model, with an independent audit of mentee gains.
• Integrate waste pickers through ID cards, cooperatives and contracts for material recovery facilities.

National Entrepreneurship Day is observed on 9 November, the date on which the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) was set up in 2014. The occasion is a useful point to take stock of a support architecture that now runs from ₹50,000 micro-loans to ₹10,000 crore venture funds.

• Ranking: the Government describes India as the 3rd-largest startup ecosystem in the world.
• Growth: recognitions rose by 51.6% and direct jobs by 36.1% in FY 2025-26 over FY 2024-25.
• Geography: startups exist in every State and UT. Maharashtra, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Gujarat lead on recognitions and jobs (as of 31 March 2026).
• Gender: over 1.07 lakh startups (~48%) have at least one woman director or partner.
• Demography: the Government cites that nearly 65% of India’s population is under 35. This is the demographic dividend the policy aims to harness.

Figure 1 — India’s Startup Ecosystem at a Glance

Five States account for the largest share of recognised startups and jobs, a pattern that the push towards non-metro entrepreneurship seeks to change. Image courtesy PIB Backgrounder (source: Ministry of Commerce & Industry); reproduced with credit for educational use.

• PMRY (1993) + REGP (1995) → PMEGP (2008): two self-employment schemes were merged into one, with the subsidy routed through banks.
• NRLM / Aajeevika (2011) → DAY-NRLM (2016): SVEP was added as its rural enterprise arm. The National Campaign on Entrepreneurship-II (Aug–21 Nov 2026) is linked to the stated goal of 6 crore Lakhpati Didis.
• FFS 1.0 (2016) → FFS 2.0 (2026): the focus has shifted from general venture capital to deep-tech and manufacturing.
• AIM (2016) → AIM 2.0 (2024); TIDE → TIDE 2.0 (2019).
• MUDRA: the Tarun Plus tier (₹10–20 lakh) followed the Union Budget 2024-25 decision to double the loan ceiling from ₹10 lakh.
• PM SVANidhi: the loan ladder was raised from ₹10k/₹20k/₹50k to ₹15k/₹25k/₹50k, and a credit card was added for good repayers.
• Angel tax (Section 56(2)(viib), Income-tax Act), a long-standing startup grievance, was abolished in the Union Budget 2024-25.

• Jobs: India’s large young workforce needs more job creators, because formal salaried jobs alone cannot absorb new entrants.
• Innovation and productivity: startups carry new technology into sectors such as fintech, agritech, healthtech and defence.
• Inclusion: 52% of recognised startups come from non-metro cities, and rural schemes reach SC/ST/OBC and women entrepreneurs.
• Strategic autonomy: the deep-tech focus of FFS 2.0 and the 27 Champion Sectors under CGSS (aerospace, defence, biotech) ties entrepreneurship to self-reliance.

• Recognitions ≠ active firms: the 2.62 lakh figure is a cumulative count of recognitions, not of surviving businesses. Job numbers are self-reported to DPIIT.
• Thin credit uptake: only 532 CGSS loans in three years, against a base of 2.62 lakh startups (about 0.2%). Collateral-free debt has barely reached startups.
• Leverage works, but at small scale: FFS-backed AIFs invested about 2.2 times the amount SIDBI committed. Still, only 1,475 startups have benefited.
• Concentration: capital, unicorns and exits cluster in a few metros, even though recognitions are spreading.
• Weak R&D base: India’s gross expenditure on R&D is about 0.64% of GDP, which limits deep-tech pipelines.
• Necessity vs opportunity entrepreneurship: small-ticket MUDRA and vendor loans often support subsistence self-employment, which can mask under-employment rather than create growth firms.
• Gender: having a woman director is not the same as women-founded or women-controlled ownership.

• Publish survival and employment data for recognised startups, verified through EPFO/GST records.
• Raise R&D spending and patient capital for deep-tech, including through the ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Scheme approved in 2025, and through public procurement.
• Use State startup policies and DPIIT’s States’ Startup Ranking to build Tier-II/III clusters around local industry.
• Build a graduation path from MUDRA borrower to MSME to startup, with skilling under MSDE.