A view of the Mahatma Gandhi Bridge - also known as Mahatma Gandhi Setu - during major renovation. (File photo)
, built by kings, is the cleanest city in India. Chandigarh, designed by French architect Le Corbusier, is the second among 73 cities ranked on the basis of how clean they are and whether they have lived up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "Swachh Bharat" or Clean India dream.
PM Modi's constituency Varanasi has ranked among the dirtiest of towns in the country despite his well-publicised cleanliness drive.
The other towns who are at the bottom of the list are Dhanbad in Jharkhand, Bengal's Asansol and Arunachal Pradesh capital Itanagar.
For the survey, towns with over 10 lakh population and 22 state capitals were chosen. Noida and Kolkata, who were in the original list, opted out saying they would join the next survey.
Other bottom-ranking cities are Patna, Meerut, Raipur, Ghaziabad, Kalyan and Jamshedpur.
The result of the survey is being projected as evidence of how the PM's Swachh Bharat campaign is making an impact.
The field survey was conducted by the Quality Council of India in January after the methodology and evaluation criteria were shared with the cities three months in advance.
The last cleanliness survey was conducted for the clean India effort under the Congress-led UPA rule in 2014 before PM Modi launched the Swachh Bharat mission. It covered all 476 cities that have a population of over a lakh each.
Based on the previous ranks, four cities have improved to break into top 10 in 2016 - Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, Surat and Rajkot in Gujarat and Sikkim's Gangtok.
Four cities that have dropped out of the top 10 are - Greater Mumbai, Pune and Nashik in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu capital Chennai.
Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu said: "This is the first evidence of churning and keenness on the part of cities to compete with others and improve sanitation and rankings by catching up with well performing cities."
Four cities have stayed at the same rank in both surveys - Mysuru, which topped both lists, Tiruchiraplli, Pimpri Chindwad and Ludhiana.
The government decided that the 2014 survey was not a fair comparison as it pitted tiny towns against big cities.