Pune can now confidently take the title of the best city in India, according to a survey on urban governance. On the other hand, Bengaluru has a long way to go. The survey was conducted across 23 cities by a not-for-profit organisation Janaagraha in Bengaluru.
This the fifth survey of its kind of city-systems in India. Pune scored 5.1 on a scale of 10. Kolkata, Thiruvananthapuram, Bhubaneshwar and then Surat followed. Delhi was ninth in 2016 but has improved this time, moving up three places to sixth, Mumbai instead took Delhi’s ninth spot this year. The sore losers this time were Bengaluru, Dehradun, Patna and Chandigarh scoring between 3 and 3.3 on 10.
Thiruvananthapuram was last year’s winner followed by Pune and Kolkata. The scale assesses the quality of governance through laws, policies and institutional policies. But what the scale proves is that India’s cities are not improving as fast as they should be. In comparison to cities like London and New York which scored 8.8 Indian cities lag far behind. Johannesburg is also a city in a developing country but it scored 7.6.
It was found that the 23 cities don’t even make enough internally to pay municipal staff well. The lack of local democracy also poses a serious problem as only 2 cities out of the 23 have placed ward committees and sabhas. Only 9 cities had a citizen’s charter. The citizen participation in all cities is lacking. 19 cities don’t even release data of their functioning publicly. What was found was that the cities were still functioning using old planning frameworks before liberalisation. This is also having an adverse impact on India’s GDP costing it up to 3% per year.
While every government in Karnataka comes championing development and progress, throwing the dirt on each other, the matters on the ground speak volumes. This has come at a bad time for Congress under whom the city’s score has been revealed. If the urban areas of the country are facing these issues, imagine the rural, what kind of progress is India talking about?