MoHUA releases draft guidelines to assess financial health of Indian cities

NEW DELHI: The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Government of India, introduced draft guidelines and framework for ‘City Finance Rankings’ to assess and rank cities and urban local bodies (ULBs) across India. The rankings aim to assess financial health of Indian cities and ULBs. Apart from the ‘City Finance Rankings’ the ministry has also launched the draft guidelines for ‘City Beauty Competition 2022’. 

As per the draft guidelines for ‘City Finance Rankings’ cities would be assessed based on their current financial status and improvement made overtime based on three parameters, including resource mobilisation, expenditure performance and fiscal governance. The ranking is an effort to help ULBs identify areas where they could improve, thus allowing cities and local bodies to deliver quality infrastructure services to the citizens.

Hardeep Singh Puri, MoHUA, Government of India said, “This initiative will provide the necessary nudge to the urban local bodies to undertake financial reforms for improving their financial status, besides facilitating peer learning, building internal capacities to address present and future challenges, and realizing the cities’ potential as engines of growth and development. The exercise aims to assist ULBs in identifying their areas of improvement taking forward the municipal finance reforms agenda.”

The ranking of cities and ULBs will be determined based on the self-reported financial data, verified and validated from the financial documents submitted by each participating ULB. ULBs will submit this data on the online rankings module, which will be operational by the end of January 2023.

Cities will be classified into four categories based on their respective population level. These four categories are less than 100,000, 100,000 to one million, one million to four million and above four million. And top three ULBs from each population category will be rewarded at the national level.

There will be state-level rankings as well. The ministry is inviting comments on the draft from January 15, and the guidelines would be finalised by January 30.

‘City Finance Rankings’ stress financial health on one hand, and the ‘City Beauty Competition’ aims to encourage and give recognition to the transformational efforts made by cities aimed at creating beautiful, innovative and inclusive public spaces in their area of jurisdiction on the other hand. Apart from that, the competition is also aimed at developing a sense of community ownership, improving quality of life, heritage conservation, neighbourhood revitalisation, sustainable communities and ecological conservation, thus fostering development of local economy.

‘Beautiful Wards’ and ‘Beautiful Public Spaces’ are two central and state-level awards which include green spaces, water fronts, tourist or heritage sites and market and other commercial spaces.