Capital ahead in urban governance

BHUBANESWAR: The State Capital, Bhubaneswar, has left behind metros like New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and IT cities like Hyderabad and Bengaluru to rank fourth in the country in terms of urban governance.As per fifth annual survey of India’s City-Systems (ASICS) by a Bengaluru-based non-profit organisation, Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, Pune topped the list with 5.1 out of 10 points while Bhubaneswar scored 4.6. Kolkata and Thiruvananthapuram occupied the second and third positions respectively. The Temple City was ranked 10th in 2016.

In its 2017 edition of the survey, Janaagraha evaluated quality of governance in 23 major cities basing on 89 questions.Bhubanesar has , however, improved its rank by six positions and score by 1.1 point over the 2016 survey. The temple city has showed improvement in the total per capita capex with an average of `366.31 in the last three years.

It has also performed well on AMRUT reforms such as credit rating, implementation of double entry accounting system and publishing of demand collection book. Documents like audited financial statements, municipal staffing data and internal audit reports have been made available online.
Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Dehradun, Patna and Chennai constituted the bottom five cities with scores in the range of 3 to 3.3.

The agency clarified that ASICS did not take into consideration the quality of infrastructure and services such as roads and traffic, garbage, water, housing, sanitation and air pollution. 
Deputy Head (Advocacy and Reforms) at Janaagraha, Anil Nair said the preparedness of cities to deliver high quality infrastructure and services in the long-run by evaluating several factors have been studied.
The National ranking came a day after Bhubaneswar was placed 19th in the Global Smart City Performance Index 2017 prepared by a UK-based research and consulting agency.