National Orientation workshop organized for Assessment of Liveability indices for 116 cities in India

Feb 13,2018

Shri Hardeep Puri, Minister of State (I/C) for Housing & Urban Affairs has informed that his Ministry has planned to conduct an ‘Annual Assessment of Liveability Standards in Cities – an ambitious national project what 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 and hoped that the implementation of this framework will help cities to understand their baseline and pursue tangible outcomes over time.  He was inaugurating a National Orientation Workshop on Assessment of Liveability Indices for 116 Cities in India organized here today. 

Shri Durga Shankar Mishra, Secretary, Dr. Sameer Sharma, Additional Secretary, State Principal Secretaries/Mission Directors, Municipal Commissioners of cities selected for liveability index and CEOs of Smart City SPVs, representatives of multi-lateral/bilateral agencies were also present at the Workshop. 

Addressing the participants, the Minister said that 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. 

The Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs has developed a set of liveability standards in cities which was launched in June 2017 with an objective of developing these standards to generate a liveability 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 liveability 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.

During the course of the Workshop, Ms. Trisha Suresh, Senior Consultant at the Economist Intelligence Unit presented EIU’s experience in undertaking liveability rankings globally and specifically outline how this has been leveraged by cities for planning and management.  Ms. Deepa Karthykeyan, Director, Athena Infonomicspresented the approach for the liveability assessment of the 116 Indian cities. She  explained the key categories of the indicators, the associated weightages and the formula for calculating the rankings (Ex: relative vs absolute benchmarks, city categories based on population, core vs supporting indicators etc.).

The Session on Liveability Indicators, Data Sources and Collection Strategies focused on delving into every one of the 79 metrics, helping acquaint the city with the definition of the metrics and provide information on potential data sources.  Immediate feedback will be sought on each metric through an audience response system on the availability of data to support the metric and on the city’s level of comfort in terms of definitional clarity. The presentation focussed on the role that citizen perception and primary surveys is likely to play in informing the index calculation and the audit protocols associated with every data input provided by the city.