Puri announces annual assessment of Livability Index for 116 Indian cities
Minister of State for Housing & Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri today said that his ministry has planned to conduct an ‘Annual Assessment of Liveability Standards’ in cities. Speaking at an event, he informed the project will involve yearly survey and compilation of a large number of datasets across the various indicators, analysis of such datasets, development of indexes and ranking of cities. He also expressed hoped that the implementation of this framework will help cities to understand their baseline and pursue tangible outcomes over time.
Addressing the participants at a national orientation workshop on assessment of livability indices for 116 cities in India, Puri said, “The purpose of this Workshop is to make the States and Cities understand the complete process for assessment of liveability indices by the selected agency and deliberate on various issues and get feedback on the proposed methodology.”
Puri had last month announced the commencement of the country’s first-ever ‘Liability Index’ to rank 116 cities which include the identified Smart Cities and few more cities with a population of over 1 million. The set of livability standards in cities was launched in June 2017 with an objective of developing these standards to generate a livability index and rate cities against these standards to facilitate a competitive environment amongst cities and result in systematic improvement in the quality of life of citizens. All these standards are also strongly linked to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The assessment of livability standards will help India to track and achieve these SDGs. These indicators have been adapted from various national/international indicator sets and service level benchmarks and after extensive consultations with State/City Governments, citizen through MyGov portal and peer review by sector experts.
There are 79 indicators that have been organized in 15 distinct ‘Categories’ covering aspects such as Governance, Health and Education, Safety, Identity and Culture, Economy, Pollution, Mixed Land Use and Compactness, Open Spaces, Urban Mobility and various Core Urban Services, and contribute to the 4 essential pillars of comprehensive development namely: Institutional, Social, Economic and Physical.
The ministry, through an international bidding process under a World Bank-funded programme, has selected the 'IPSOS Research Pvt Ltd' in consortium with the 'Athena Infonomics India Pvt Ltd' and 'Economist Group Ltd' for the assessment of the livability indices in 116 cities.
