By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, JAN 21, 2018: THE Housing & Urban Affairs Minister also announced the commencement of the Liveability Index Programme in 116 cities. The MoHUA is implementing several flagship Urban Missions. An overarching goal of these missions is to make Indian cities more ‘Liveable'. To develop a common minimum framework for cities to assess their existing status and chart their pathway towards providing a better quality of life to their citizens, the MoHUA has developed a set of ‘Liveability Standards' relevant to Indian cities to generate a Liveability Index and rate cities. These standards were launched in June, 2018. 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.

MoHUA through an international bidding process under World Bank funded CBUD programme has selected M/s IPSOS Research Private Limited in consortium with M/s ATHENA INFONOMICS India Private Limited and Economist Group Limited for assessment of liveability indices in 116 cities.

Some of the key outputs of the exercise will include:

++ Roll 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 to inform the city assessment reports.

++ Over 1 lakh citizen and user surveys across the country to measure satisfaction on urban services.

++ A state of the art ‘Economist-Portal' to spatially map the data and the ‘Liveability Index' outputs that will serve as a knowledge base for decision making on policy and planning.

++ A framework to systematically capture City GDP, which may be integrated and rolled out in subsequent rounds.