Is Bhubaneswar The Best Indian City To Live, Survey To Tell
January 19: The Ministry of Urban Development on Friday announced the commencement of a nation-wide survey, to be instituted by global agencies to find out the best Indian cities to live in. Bhubaneswar and Rourkela, the two Smart Cities of Odisha, also feature among the list of cities to be examined in the survey.
The mega survey christened as the ‘Liveability Index’ will examine a total of 116 Indian cities to find out which are the best or leading Indian cities when it comes to gratifying the needs of the citizens.
The World Bank will fund the project, which has been envisaged to rank the selected Indian cities. The programme to scrutinise the cities formally started on Friday when the newly inducted Urban Development Minister Hardeep Singh Puri launched the survey in New Delhi.
The index ranking was earlier planned when the former Union Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu was heading the ministry in June last year. It was then decidedthat 79 indicators would be used to rank the cities overall and among different segments;however, the programme was formally launched on Friday.
In the survey, the agencies will try to find out the levels of performance of the cities based on the local governance, economical progress, social inclusion and the levels of physical infrastructure. According to the planning of ranking these cities, different weightages will be given to different areas.
In order to ensure uniformity in ranking, all these cities will be rankedbased only on the 79 prescribed indicators. The highest weightage will be given to the physical infrastructure in the city (45%), followed by the governance index (25%), social sector performance (25%) and economic performance at five per cent.
According to the detailed guidelines of the survey, the parameters of examination to be usedby the survey team include investigating the number of taxes levied and collected in the city, number of taxes billed, restoration of the city’s historic buildings, level of hotel occupancy, number of kids attaining primary education, and prevalence of water borne and vector borne diseases, among other considerations.
The other important factorsto be examined by the team are the crime rate, pollution levels, coverage of toilets, levels of direct water supply, availability of passenger information service and levels of public transport.
The key output of the exercise will include reconnaissance visits to all 116 cities to evaluate critical information about the cityto update the city assessment reports based on user surveys of over one lakh citizens across the country to measure satisfaction on urban services. The survey will be a framework to assess systematically city’s GDP, to be integrated and rolled out in subsequent rounds.