Guwahati being ranked at 44 among 95 big cities (in the category of 3 lakh to 10 lakh population) in the 2024-25 Swachh Survekshan, even after emerging as the cleanest capital in the Northeast region, mirrors the city’s marked underperformance in cleanliness, hygiene, and sanitation. The annual survey is all about making people realise how important it is to keep their city clean. As this was the ninth survey in a row, the results also paint a gloomy picture of the city continuing to face the challenge of lack of adequate citizen-led initiatives to keep it clean. The survey results are not just mere numbers but a reminder for the authorities to improve institutional efforts and instill the sense of shared responsibility among resident and floating populations about their ownership of the city’s cleanliness. A lane in a municipal ward will not stay clean when residents only ask if it has been swept but when they also ask themselves if they have stopped throwing garbage—plastic bottles and everyday waste—into its corners. Indore, which has been declared the cleanest city for the eighth time in a row, has its hard-earned lessons for Guwahati to learn. It could not have been possible for Indore to achieve this coveted position without a multi-pronged approach of engineering a major behavioural change in garbage segregation at home and other sources of generation into six different types of waste, multi-compartment garbage-carrying vans to avoid mixing segregated waste, and simultaneous improvement of waste processing for revenue generation and producing compressed natural gas from municipal waste to power the fleet of buses. Guwahati Municipal Corporation introducing colour-coded vans for dry and wet waste collection seems to be supply-driven without any initiative on the ground to make people segregate dry and wet waste and also train garbage collectors to adhere to the colour codes during door-to-door collection or while picking up garbage dumped on roadside after collection in pull carts. For the system to bridge the gap, it only requires focusing on behavioural change among residents and garbage collectors, which does not involve any expenditure. The residents can either buy or use unused containers for segregating dry and wet wastes into two separate bins and also ensure that the garbage collector strictly follows the colour code. The contractor engaged in collection does not see the entire exercise to be a cleanliness exercise but meeting the targets of daily collection of garbage and raising the invoice, which reduces the entire door-to-door collection of garbage into a checklist. The oversight mechanism is also limited to GMC officials tallying the trips completed by the contractors, and the segregation of wastes lies buried in the heap of daily checklists. Swachh Survekshan results is a wake-up call for GMC authorities to take note that measuring cleanliness only by the volume of wastes collected and removedis a flawed metric and expenditure of taxpayer’s money in procurement of colour-coded garbage vans will remain a wasteful expenditure if segregated collection is not incentivised or prioritised in outsourced garbage collection. The solution to the chronic waste problem of the city does not lie in expanding the waste collection capacity without building the capacity for scientific processing to prevent air and water pollution. The citizens reducing generation of plastic waste only requires them to reduce their demand for plastic carry bags while visiting the daily markets, and the authorities enforce the ban on single-use plastic carry bags by undertaking frequent and surprise raids of the markets and shops besides stockists and suppliers. They must also stop treating drains as dustbins. Such behavioural change can also make a big difference to the waterlogging problem in different areas of the city to a great extent, as it will reduce the menace of plastic carry bags and bottles clogging the drains. Dearth of space for establishing of waste processing facility is often cited as a major obstacle in city building an efficient waste processing facility. The GMC authorities actively encouraging citizens to play a participatory role in waste segregation, collection, and keeping their respective locality clean alongside the GMC staff can go a long way in boosting confidence about the importance of a modern scientific waste processing facility to keep the entire city clean. Transparency in the entire system will help the GMC earn the confidence and cooperation of city residents in the acquisition of identified land for setting up such infrastructure projects. The city authorities observing the widening gap between planning and execution of various cleanliness projects and understanding why they have failed to make Guwahati clean is an urgent need of the hour. Swachh Survekshan numbers send a clear message. Without citizens looking at the entire gamut of cleanliness as their shared responsibility the aspiration for Guwahati to move up the national ranking list will remain trapped in a revolving door of waste collection and dumping.