Namma Bengaluru most liveable city in India

Team Udayavani, Jun 20, 2021, 10:37 AM IST

Bengaluru: A study by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) revealed that Bengaluru is the topmost livable city in India.

For the quality of governance rankings of the cities, five parameters were used: services, finance, technology, urban planning, and overall governance. Delhi ranked high on services, finance and governance, but received very low scores between 30 and 40 in both the urban planning and the technology categories.

Bengaluru was ranked as the best city overall, followed by Chennai. The CSE report states, “Only one state capital (Bengaluru) demonstrates a decent economic ability, scoring 78.8 out of 100, four other state capitals (Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi, and Hyderabad) provide middling economic opportunities.

“The Ease of Living Index 2020 included citizen’s feedback for the first time. It is interesting that despite faring poorly on almost all development parameters, the capitals obtained high scores in the citizens’ feedback section. We need to understand why urban citizens think so highly of their clearly poorly performing cities,” Richard Mahapatra, Managing Editor of Down To Earth said.

This is the second edition of the index, originally launched in 2018. The current index has seen a significant change from that of last year, the most noticeable being the inclusion of citizens’ feedback to establish the liveability of Indian cities.

CSE director Sunita Narain, while releasing the e-book, said: “There is drama in numbers, especially when these numbers give you a trend — are things getting better or worse? It is even more powerful when you can use the trend to understand the crisis, the challenge and the opportunity. The numbers in the case of Indian cities clearly suggest that the direction of development in them is unsustainable.”

Narain said accurate data availability can be of great help especially in the time of COVID pandemic. “Just consider how we have suffered in this past year because we do not have sufficient or accurate data on tests, or the number of deaths, or serological surveys, or genomic sequencing of the variants. In each case, data would have been (and is) critical for policy-making,” she said.