Govt launches liveability index to rate 116 Indian cities, ranking expected by June

The government on Friday launched the Liveability index to rate 116 Indian cities. The tool seeks to measure the quality of life in 99 smart cities, capital cities and those with a population of over one million.

The ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA) through an international bidding process under World Bank-funded CBUD programme has selected IPSOS Research Private Limited in alliance with Athena Infonomics India Private Limited and Economist Group Limited for assessing the liveability indices in 116 cities, union minister for housing and urban affairs Hardeep S Puri said on Friday.

This assessment is being conducted along with the Economic Intelligence Unit of The Economist, a London-based weekly that has already developed a liveability ranking for 140 cities globally. This programme will be funded by the World Bank, he said.

The ranking of these cities is expected to be ready by June, sources said.

Besides the 99 smart cities announced, the cities to be assessed under the liveability index include Delhi’s three municipal corporations, Bengaluru, Kochi, Ghaziabad, Meerut, Varanasi, Allahabad, Lucknow, Faridabad and other capital cities, sources said.

Sources said that the rating will help cities attain a liveable city status, get them more investments and improve tourism.

These cities will be rated on parameters such as local governance, social infrastructure, education, employment, health, safety, security, physical infrastructure such as housing, availability of open spaces, land use, energy, availability of water, solid waste management, pollution, etc.

The exercise will include rolling out of over 30 capacity building workshops to understand ‘urban data’ and equip cities with the necessary tools and knowledge to create the database for the evaluation. Reconnaissance visits to all 116 cities to capture critical city-level information. It will include over one lakh citizen and user surveys across the country to measure satisfaction level of citizens on urban services, sources said.

There will also be an Economist portal to spatially map the data and the Liveability Index outputs that will serve as a knowledge base for taking policy decisions and for planning, they said.

A framework to systematically capture city GDP may be rolled out in subsequent rounds, they said.

The MoHUA has developed a set of Liveability Standards relevant to Indian cities to generate a Liveability Index and rate cities. The framework has its genesis in the 24 Smart City features contained in the Smart City Proposals and includes 79 indicators (57 core indicators and 22 supporting indicators). These indicators are organised in 15 distinct categories, designed for measuring various institutional, social, economic and physical aspects that affect the quality of life of citizens and determine the liveability of a city, a ministry note said.