Under Swachh Shehar Jodi, a mentor city principally:

Shares sanitation experience and works with a mentee on improvements

Replaces the mentee's local administration

Provides all infrastructure funding for the mentee

Regulates sanitation services across the entire state

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between mentor and mentee cities records:

The city's annual property-tax assessment schedule

The agreed cooperation between the cities

A national ranking formula applied to every city

The boundary notification creating a municipality

Swachh Shehar Jodi: How City Mentoring Supports Better Sanitation Services

Why in news?

Ahmedabad–Sanand, Indore–Depalpur and Tirupati–Kuppam were recognised as the top three pairs in the Swachh Shehar Jodi category at the Swachh Survekshan Awards 2025–26. President Droupadi Murmu presented the national cleanliness awards in New Delhi on 11 November 2026. Swachh Shehar Jodi links a high-performing mentor city with a mentee city seeking to improve its sanitation services. The aim is to share practical knowledge, develop joint plans and apply useful methods in the mentee city. The awards bring attention to cooperation as one way to strengthen the everyday systems behind urban cleanliness.

How the city pairs work

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs runs the initiative under the Swachh Bharat Mission–Urban. A mentor city brings experience from its sanitation and waste-management work. A mentee city studies that experience and works with the mentor to improve its own services. Their relationship is organised through a Memorandum of Understanding, or MoU, which records the agreed cooperation.

The ministry launched the programme in September 2025, following guidelines issued the previous month. The launch provided for joint action plans with defined milestones and direct exposure to practices in better-performing cities. It was supported through the mission's capacity-building work.

At the November 2026 awards, the ministry reported that 70 mentor cities had been paired with 191 mentee cities. Ahmedabad is the mentor for Sanand, Indore for Depalpur, and Tirupati for Kuppam in the three leading pairs. The pairs belong to Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh respectively.

Diagram links the mentor–mentee partnership, joint plan, practical learning and review of progress. — Partnerships and joint plans organise city-to-city learning. Clarity original conceptual diagram.

What a joint action plan adds

An action plan turns a general intention to learn into work that can be organised and reviewed. The pair identifies priorities, agrees on activities and sets milestones. Practical exposure can then help the mentee's staff understand how a system operates and what would be needed to apply it locally.

For example, a city working to improve waste collection needs arrangements for segregated waste, transport and processing. Learning how another city coordinates those stages can help officials examine their own system. The relevant question is how the method can work with the mentee city's people, equipment and local conditions.

Eight areas of municipal work

The initiative's focus areas include visible cleanliness, waste segregation and transportation, and scientific waste processing. These connect the condition of streets and public spaces with what happens to waste after it is collected. Keeping waste streams separated helps suitable material reach the appropriate processing facility.

Other areas are access to sanitation, used-water management, and mechanised desludging with worker welfare. Desludging removes the material that accumulates in sanitation systems such as septic tanks. Using appropriate machinery and protecting sanitation workers are practical parts of managing that service.

The remaining areas are cleanliness advocacy and citizen engagement, and citizen feedback and grievance redressal. Advocacy explains and encourages useful practices. Feedback and complaint systems help residents report service problems and give local bodies information on where a response is needed.

A practical example from Sikkim

A mentor can support more than one mentee. In February 2026, Mangan Nagar Panchayat in Sikkim signed MoUs as a mentor with Rangpo, Singtam and Naya Bazaar–Jorethang Nagar Panchayats. The state government's account described proposed field training, capacity-building workshops and support for documentation alongside the action plan.

This example shows how a partnership can connect municipal institutions and their staff around shared work. The learning concerns both facilities and the organisational practices needed to keep a service running.

Why local participation matters

At the awards, the President emphasised cooperation among citizens, local administrations and sanitation workers. She also highlighted the value of workers' suggestions and citizen feedback. These contributions help connect a city's formal plans with the conditions encountered in daily service delivery.

Conclusion

Swachh Shehar Jodi uses municipal experience as a resource for another city's improvement. Its working parts are the partnership, the joint plan and practical learning. Together, they give mentor and mentee cities a structured way to work on sanitation services.