Urban Development: City Finance Rankings And City Beauty Competition Launched To Reward Urban Local Bodies

Taking urban rejuvenation journey to next level, Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry has launched City Finance Rankings and City Beauty Competition. The two key initiatives are crucial for urban development across the country.

'City Finance Rankings 2022' aims to evaluate, recognize and reward Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) on the basis of their strength across three financial parameters: resource mobilization, expenditure performance and fiscal governance systems, said Union Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep S Puri.

Puri was speaking at the launch of two initiatives amid the presence of senior officials from the Ministry.

All 4500 plus cities/ULBs across all states and union territories would be encouraged to participate in the 'City Finance Rankings 2022'. 

‘City Finance Rankings, 2022’ would create a conducive environment for developing a robust municipal finance ecosystem for promoting financially healthy, transparent and sustainable cities.

The Minister said that in May 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed the office, he decided to view urbanisation. He embraced urbanisation as a challenge and made it win.

Flagship schemes such as Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), where the project of the government ended up being a Jan Andolan, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) and SBM 2.0 have been launched.

"There is a significant increase in the amount of waste processing and management since 2014, he said. India has embarked on the most ambitious plan of urban rejuvenation undertaken anywhere in the world,” he further added.

Speaking about the idea behind the initiatives Puri said that the thought came from the Prime Minister, when he met the chief secretaries of all the states in June this year, and he outlined a vision of a pan-India ranking of the cities — to foster a healthy competition among the municipal bodies in the matter of finances during this conference.

There is a growing realisation among local bodies that if you have healthy finances, and if your procedures are transparent, then the land value goes up and that is the beauty of this venture which is being launched, he said.

Talking about the ‘City Beauty Competition’ initiative, the Minister said that this has been launched to encourage and recognize the transformational efforts made by the cities and wards in India towards creating beautiful, innovative and inclusive public spaces.

The ‘City Finance Rankings, 2022’ aim to evaluate, recognize and reward India’s cities (ULBs) on the basis of the quality of their current financial health and improvement over time in financial performance.

The rankings will serve as a constant motivation for city/state officials to continue to implement municipal finance reforms.

The participating ULBs will be evaluated on 15 indicators across three key municipal finance assessment parameters, namely:

• Resource Mobilization

The cities will be ranked at the national level on the basis of their scores under any one of the following four population categories:

(i) Above 4 million (ii) Between 1-4 million (iii) 100,000 to 1 million (iv) Less than 100,000.

The top 3 cities in each population category will be recognized and rewarded at the national level as well as within each state cluster.

City Finance Rankings are an effort to analyse and help the ULBs in identifying areas in their financial performance where they can make further improvements, to be able to deliver quality infrastructure and services to its citizens.

At the state and national-level, the rankings will highlight the outcomes achieved by municipalities and provide critical insights to key policy makers into the state of finances of urban local bodies.

ULBs can benefit immensely by participating in the fiscal rankings as they will be able to self-evaluate their own performance vis-à-vis other cities, which can help them in self-improvement in future.

The City Beauty Competition would facilitate most beautiful wards and beautiful public places at the city level.

Wards and public places of cities would be judged against the five broad pillars: (i) accessibility (ii) amenities (iii) activities (iv) aesthetics and (v) ecology.

While selected wards would be felicitated at the city and state levels, most beautiful public places in cities such as Waterfronts, Green spaces, tourist/heritage spaces and market/commercial places would be awarded first at the state and then shortlisted for award at the National level.

It is hoped that healthy competition amongst wards and cities would encourage urban local bodies to improve their basic infrastructure, and also make the urban spaces beautiful, sustainable and inclusive.

This initiative of the government and the healthy competition is expected to encourage wards and cities to come forward to showcase their initiatives and interventions towards creating functionally beautiful public spaces, while also preserving their rich cultural heritage.