New Delhi: Pune has emerged as the easiest city to live in India, followed closely by Navi Mumbai and Greater Mumbai in a ranking of 111 Indian cities. Thane is the fourth Maharashtra city that made it to the top 10 in the list.
Among the 111 cities in the country, Rampur of Uttar Pradesh, Kohima of Nagaland and Patna of Bihar have been ranked as the worst cities. The national capital has been put on 65th position on the index of liveable cities.
Except Mumbai and 14th ranked Chennai, the performance of the other Metro cities has been quite disappointing. While Bengaluru has been ranked at 58th position, Kolkata did not take part in the ranking.
According to a survey conducted by the ministry of housing and urban affairs, among 111 cities to measures the quality of life, Muzzafarpur of Bihar and Ghaziabad of Uttar Pradesh which ranked 63 and 46 respectively were better cities than the national capital. The report was released by the Union housing and urban affairs minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Monday.
Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, which have a number of big cities, found no representation in the top 10 rankings.
The Ease of Living Index is an initiative of the ministry of housing and urban affairs to help cities assess their liveability vis-à-vis global and national benchmarks and encourage cities to move towards an “outcome-based” approach to urban planning and management. Cities were ranked on four factors — institutions and governance, social infrastructure (education/health), economic factors and physical infrastructure. The evaluation of cities has been done on a 100-point scale across the 78 indicators with the institutional and social pillars, carrying 25 points each — 5 points for the pillar on economic, and 45 points for the physical pillar.
Apart from Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh were the only states to have more than one city listed in the top ten rankings. While Vijayawada and Tirupati were selected from Andhra Pradesh, the two cities in the list from Madhya Pradesh were Bhopal and Indore.
This is the first time that the government had decided to conduct a survey to measure quality of life in 111 cities.
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