Aurangabad among 12 Maharashtra cities shortlisted for liveability study

The housing and urban affairs ministry has formulated a ‘liveability index’ computed through assessment of the quality and standard of life.
The index will be set on four pillars,15 categories for assessment and 79 categories to arrive at a composite measure that like air quality index will indicate the liveability standard of the city. The index, computed after a detailed survey of the various services available, will now tell citizens how good their city is.

A total of 116 cities have been shortlisted by the central government with 12 of them being in Maharashtra. The respective municipal corporations like  Aurangabad,  Nashik, Pune, Pimpri-Chinchwad, and Nagpur along with BMC and that of Navi Mumbai, Thane, Mira-Bhayander, Kalyan-Dombivili,Vasai-Virar in the MMR  will have to submit answers to 560 questions by April 16.

A central team will visit the cities for a physical audit of answers given by the civic bodies and also ask for supporting documents to verify and finalise the index.

The data compilation and study of the answers will be done by the civic body and fed into a portal. The index of liveability will be compiled around four pillars—institutional, social, economic and physical. These are the broad categories under which 15 sections will be evaluated on the basis of 79 indicators.

Evaluation of an indicator: For better understanding let’s take an example. The indicator of an online service provided by an urban local body will be broken into parts to get an actual service.

The process involves dividing the number of citizen service available by the total number of services actually provided. In the case of property tax, the total collection will be divided by the actual tax demand which will give the percentage efficiency of the particular local body.

Similarly, in case of the city’s security and safety the total number of functional CCTVs installed both by the city authority, traffic police, police department and privately-owned CCTVs integrated with the command centres will be divided by the total road length.