Raipur is ranked 7th in The Ease of living Index, an initiative of the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) to help cities assess liveability vis-à-vis global and national benchmarks, released on Monday, the  MoHUA press release informed.

The rankings are as follows: Pune (1), Navi Mumbai (2), Greater Mumbai (3), Tirupati (4), Chandigarh (5), Thane (6), Raipur (7), Indore (8), Vijaywada (9) and Bhopal (10).

In the Institutional Category, Bilaspur was ranked fifth among top 10 cities in the country.

The Ease of living Index is an initiative of MoHUA 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.

It was decided by the Central Government in June 2017 to rank cities based on the liveability parameters. The implementation of the assessment commenced formally on January 19, 2018 covering 111 cities.

Ease of living framework comprises four pillars namely Institutional, Social, Economic and Physical which are further broken down into 15 categories and 78 indicators.

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.

The whole exercise is being carried out on a mass scale and began with a National Orientation Workshop to orient city officials on assessment framework. It was followed by 33 state level workshops spread across all 36 states and Union Territories.

A data entry portal and a monitoring dashboard for real time update on progress was established. The cities submitted data on more than 50000 points. Secondary audit of 10,000 documents, physical audit of 14,000 units and survey of more than 60,000 citizens have been completed which led to finalization of ease of living index.

The Ease of living assessment standards are closely linked to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and will provide a strong impetus to India’s effort for systematic tracking progress of SDGs in the urban areas.

Of the 17 SDG goals, 8 goals are directly linked to India’s ease of living assessment framework with SDG 11 that is aimed at making our cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable being measured through a set of 30 indicators, the press release informed.

Apart from presenting the overall national ranking of 111 cities, the dashboard will present ranking of the cities across pillars, category, geographical zone and population classifications (four classifications of cities based on population include: Classification 1- Cities with population of 4 million and above; Classification 2: Cities with population greater than 1 million but less than 4 million; Classification 3: Cities with population greater 0.5 million but less than 1 million; and Classification 4: Cities with population less than 0.5 million). The dashboard will also have a comparison feature that will allow users to analyse the performance across cities on various liveability parameters.