Janaagraha
Center for Citizenship & Democracy releases 2nd Edition of Annual Survey of
India's City-Systems ASICS (2014)
New Delhi, June 10,
2014: Janaagraha Center for
Citizenship & Democracy today released the 2nd Edition of the
Annual Survey of India's City-Systems (ASICS).
ASICS 2014 is an
objective benchmarking exercise of Indian cities and undoubtedly the most
comprehensive evaluation of Urban India. Covering 21 cities, the surveythrows
up interesting insights on citizen participation, public services, powers of
municipal corporations, transparency in governance and urban planning in
India’s leading cities.
KEY FINDINGS
·
Indian cities score in a range of2.5 to 4.0 on 10 against the
global benchmarks of London & New York which score9.6 & 9.3on 10
respectively.
·
Kolkata scored the highest at 4.0 riding on its sound electoral process- it has a
robust State Election Commission and witnessed high voter turnouts.
·
Thiruvananthapuram
features
a close second rank to Kolkata overall, with a marginal score difference. It is
the only city with a local body ombudsman.
·
Chandigarh scores the lowest overall
at 2.5 due to its poor legal frameworks. It lacks a
contemporary Planning Act, Public Disclosure Law and Community Participation Law.
The survey included 83
questions covering 115
parameters that define the functioning andpolicy framework of the
21 selectcities. It evaluated cities on four aspects of the City-Systems
framework-Urban Planning and Design, Urban Capacities and Resources,
Empowered and Legitimate Political Representation and Transparency,
Accountability and Participation.
The scores imply
that Indian cities are grossly under-prepared to deliver a high Quality of Life
that is sustainable in long term. The performance of Indian cities is equally
poor acrossThe City-System averages as well as the city averages.
Five insights that
surface from the ASICS 2014 scores (For details of your city refer to the
attahced ASICS 2014 report):
·
The need to focus on Transparency
in Indian cities – 17 out of the 21 cities score a zero on Open Data compared
to a perfect 10 for both London & New York
·
Delhi
comes out as the best planned city. Despite being a planned city,
Chandigarh scores the lowest on planning, a paltry 0.6 as it does not have a
contemporary planning law in place
·
All cities score 0 on compliance
to Spatial Development (Master) Plans
·
Mayors of bigger cities
like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Ahmedabad don’t have five year terms nor are
they directly elected
·
16 of the 21 ASICS cities have
passed the Community Participation Law, but no city except for Hyderabad has
constituted Area Sabhas
·
Delhi and Mumbai have 1,260 and
895 employees per 100,000 population vis-à-vis global cities. New York and
London for instance, have 5,338 and 2,961 per 100,000 population.
·
Indian cities have scored
between 1.4 and7.1on audit of urban local bodiesand only Mumbai,
Pune and Surat disclose their audits in public domain.
·
Smaller cities
have better and relatively newer legislations
compared to the bigger cities – Cities such as Thiruvananthapuram, Bhopal and
Raipur find a place in the top 10 in the
analysis whereas cities like Hyderabad and Bangalore finished 17th
and 18th respectively
COVERAGE: ASICS 2014
covers 21 cities across18 statesincluding
Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Chennai, Delhi,
Dehradun, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Kanpur, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Mumbai, Patna,
Pune, Raipur, Ranchi, Surat and Thiruvananthapuram.
Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Ramesh Ramanathan, Co-Founder, Janaagraha
Centre for Citizenship and Democracy said, “Over the years urban residents have
become immune to living with overflowing garbage in their backyards,arduous
commutes to their workplaces, shabby housing and minimal social or cultural
outlets.It is time to move the lens away from the challenges that we
encounter and delve deep into the systemic shortfalls that lie at the root of
these inefficiencies.At
Janaagraha, we believe that fixing India’s City-Systems is crucial to fixing
our cities and consequently to improving the Quality of Life for our citizens”.
ASICS allows for a
systematic, data-driven approach to formulating urban law
and policy. The score allows for a quantitative assessment of weak
areas.
Through ASICS, Janaagraha
plans to work with individual city corporations to identify key areas of
improvement on basic systemic frameworks, laws, policies and processes that can
be addressed over a short, medium and long-term timeline. ASICS isn’t just a diagnostic
tool. It also provides a roadmap for the future.
About Janaagraha: The Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and
Democracy is a non-profit organization based in Bangalore, India that aims to
improve the Quality of Life in Urban India through systemic change. Janaagraha
sees ’Quality of Life' as comprising of 'Quality of Urban Infrastructure and
Services' and 'Quality of Citizenship'. Towards the end, the organization works
with citizens and governments to catalyze civic participation from the
grassroots up, as well as governance reforms from the top down. (http://www.janaagraha.org/asics)
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