Cuttack: A central team started its assessment of the city on Thursday for the Swachh Bharat Survey ranking, but the municipal corporation is on the back foot over solid waste management.

The competition to rank 4,041 cities and towns has formally started and the Cuttack Municipal Corporation seeks to better its ranking this year over the 204th place it managed last year.

Municipal commissioner Bikash Ranjan Mohapatra said the civic administration had done its best to improve the ranking.

"We hope to better our rank this time with our solid waste management project in which we have included most of the Swachh Bharat Mission recommendations and citizen feedback," Mohapatra said but conceded that the city could lose some marks on the implementation aspect.

The criteria and weightage for various components of sanitation-related aspects used for the survey would be - solid waste management including door-to-door collection, processing, and disposal and open defecation free status among others. These will carry 35 per cent weightage, instead of 45 in the last one.

While the weightage for citizen feedback has been increased from 30 per cent to 35 per cent, in the case of independent observation it will be 30 per cent in place of 25.

Official records that formed the main subject of survey on the first day indicated that the civic body had adopted recommendations of Swachh Bharat Mission for outsourcing collection of municipal solid waste.

The corporation has also adopted recommendations of the Swachh Bharat Mission for outsourcing collection of municipal solid waste.

The civic administration claims that the terms set for outsourcing sweeping, collection, storage, segregation, transportation, composting and disposal of municipal solid waste at the existing land fill site is aimed at achieving the requirement of Swachh Bharat Mission and its service level benchmark.