Hyderabad ranks world’s 18th dirtiest city in global survey

A global survey by Radical Storage ranked Hyderabad as the 18th dirtiest city worldwide, the only Indian city on the list. Based on traveler reviews of cleanliness, hygiene, and pollution at tourist spots, the ranking highlights a gap between official efforts and public experience.

Hyderabad: Is Hyderabad losing its shine? That’s the question on everyone’s mind after a new global survey by Radical Storage, which ranked Hyderabad as the world’s 18th dirtiest city.

The rankings, which are based on the feedback from travellers on pollution, cleanliness, hygiene of public spots and other issues related to tourist experience, are bound to raise eyebrows.

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What makes it even more embarrassing is the fact that Hyderabad is the only city from India that has made it to the list of ‘World’s Dirtiest Cities’ list by Radical Storage, a tourism facilitation company.

On top of this list are some of the well-known historical European cities such as Budapest (first place), Rome (second), Las Vegas (US-third), followed by Florence, Paris, Milan, Verona, Frankfurt, Brussels, Cairo, among others.

Radical Storage, which released the listing, shared the methodology followed by it to arrive at the rankings. “For each city, we analysed the top 10 attractions and checked that each had Google reviews available. If an attraction didn’t have Google reviews, we moved to the next one on the list.

Our dataset includes every Google review posted between October 2024 and November 2025 that mentioned “clean” or “dirty,” providing a comprehensive view of perceptions of cleanliness across European and global destinations, it said.

Using a text analysis, reviews were scanned for mentions of cleanliness-related words, including ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’. Mentions were then categorised as positive or negative depending on the context, allowing each city to be assigned a ‘cleanliness score’ based on the proportions, the company said.

The ranking of Hyderabad of the dirtiest cities in the world surely reflects a disconnect between official cleanup initiatives and the actual ground reality as experienced by travelers.