Shri. Hardeep Singh Puri
Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs takes immense pride in taking forward the exercise of India’s first-ever ‘Ease of Living Index’ launched on 13 August 2018. The second edition i.e. Ease of Living Index 2019 has been strengthened based on learnings from last year’s exercise and has also been widened in scope with an accompanying Municipal Performance Index.
With this Index, the Ministry has sought to facilitate Smart Cities and other million plus cities by assessing across three Pillars viz. Quality of life, Economic Ability and Sustainability, which include a total of 14 categories and 50 indicators. It is expected that this Index will eventually lead to better planning and management of cities, thereby improving the liveability for its citizens. This assessment has been first of its kind globally in terms of scale and coverage. This year the Index has an added component of Citizen Perception Survey to assess the sense of the people with respect to liveability within cities. The assessment framework has been adapted from various national / international indicator sets and service level benchmarks and after extensive consultations with State / City Governments and Citizens through the MyGov portal and peer review by sector experts. The assessment would help city administration move towards outcome-based planning from the current input-based approach of governance. The exercise envisages judicious resource allocation, smart urban planning, efficient delivery of urban services by the Urban Local bodies and an understanding of the city’s strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
I congratulate the team at the Ministry and the Consultants for successfully completing the exercise of Ease of Living 2019 and taking this initiative forward with a high level of engagement with the cities and stakeholders. I am sure this assessment will ignite new conversations and help catalyse actions that will make our cities smarter.
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