The Housing & Urban Affairs Minister announced the commencement of the Liveability Index Programme in 116 cities.
- This programme will include 99 Smart Cities announced by the Central government and other few cities having 1 million plus population.
- The primary objective of this scheme is City Liveability Index Scheme is to assess the existing status and track their growth for providing better life to the citizens i.e. 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.
- MoHUA has setup various parameters for calculating the Liveability Index. Subsequently, framework for this scheme includes the previous 24 Smart City Features which were present in the Smart City proposals. These parameters includes 79 indicators – 57 Core indicators and 22 other 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.
- Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU) of Economist, London based weekly in alliance with the IPSOS Research Private Ltd. and Athena Infonomics India Pvt. Ltd. will perform the assessment of Liveability Index of 116 cities.
Outputs of the Liveability Index Programme
- 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.
- Govt. will also start a framework for tracking the GDP of cities in next rounds.
- Ranking of cities on the basis of Liveability Index to promote competitive environment amongst cities that result will in systematic improvements in quality of life.
