LUCKNOW: People consider the living standards in the state capital as satisfactory, but are not happy with the performance of the Lucknow Municipal Corporation.
Based on the public feedback, the city has been ranked 26th among 49 cities with 10 lakh and above population in the national “Ease of Living” (EOL) 2020 Survey by the Union ministry of housing and urban affairs.
The city got 55.1% marks out of 100 with the rating “Satisfactory”. This means living in Lucknow is slightly better than other parts of the state, but not as good as Bengaluru, Pune, Ahmedabad, Chennai and Surat which have occupied the top five slots with over 60% marks. Even Raipur, Bhopal, Jodhpur and Jaipur have scored higher than Lucknow.
In the EOL survey, people were asked to allot marks on the scale of 100 in four parameters: Quality of life, Economic Ability, Citizens Perception, and Sustainability.
In ‘Citizens Perception’, Lucknow’s score is 82.4%, which means Lucknowites have a high opinion about their city — affordable and quality education, quality of drinking water supply, adequacy of public transport, affordable electricity, quality of air and overall cleanliness.
However, in terms of ‘Quality of Life’, people have given 55.1% marks — only two percentage points more than the “needs improvement” rating. This means, people appreciate the quality of life the city offers, but want it to be better in terms of safety and security, affordable healthcare, recreational facilities, livelihood opportunities and access to financial services.
In “Sustainability” parameter, the city got 54.8% marks, which reflected that people find Lucknow a better place to lead a healthy life and consider services provided by the government organizations as satisfactory, but have a desire for more.
In ‘Economic Ability’ parameter, the city has scored just 10.5%, this means people consider that their purchasing power or income is very low.
However, in the ‘Municipal Performance’ category, Lucknow has performed poorly and is ranked 33 with 44.7% marks and rating “Needs Improvement”.
In the Municipal Performance category, local bodies were assessed on their funding and public investment, planning of projects, service delivery, use of technology and overall governance.
LMC scored 58.5% in ‘finance’ parameter, which is considered to be good. This, experts said, could be because LMC adopted new ways of raising revenue such as floating bonds and invested in new Smart City projects such as green electric crematorium.
However, in the rest of the parameters, LMC scored below 50%.
In ‘service delivery’ parameter, people gave 48.3% marks, which indicates they acknowledge that LMC is moving in the right direction, but not as per expectation, said experts.
In ‘Governance’ parameter, the scores are even lower (31%), which many believe is because of public’s resentment towards red tapism in LMC and dissatisfaction towards their corporators.
In ‘technology’ parameter, people have given only 23.8% marks. This, experts said, means people are extremely dissatisfied with LMC’s efforts to include technology as its service delivery mechanism such as online grievance redressal, bill payments and mechanised cleaning of streets and garbage collection among others.
Municipal commissioner and CEO Smart City Limited, Ajay Dwivedi, said, “I have not seen the results as of now, but we will analyse the outcome and work to improve on those areas which we are lacking.”