Ease of Living Index and Municipal Performance Index

To help assess the progress made in cities through various initiatives and empower them to use evidence to plan, implement & monitor their performance, two Assessment Frameworks, viz. Ease of Living Index (EoLI) and Municipal Performance Index (MPI) have been launched by the Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs.

  • Both the indices represent an attempt to gauge the performance of cities across India on various parameters of urban living. The Ease of Living Index encapsulates the outcome indicators while the Municipal Performance Index captures the enabling input parameters. These indices provide a holistic assessment of cities based on their efforts to cultivate better quality of life, create infrastructure, and address challenges of urbanization.

Municipal Performance Index 2020

  • The MPI report describes the quality of urban governance (or performance of municipalities) in select cities. This will help Municipalities in better planning and management, filling the gaps in city administration, and improving the liveability of cities for its citizens.
  • The Municipal Performance Index (MPI) 2020 has been calculated for 111 cities of India. In this case, 51 cities have a population of over a million, and 60 cities are less than a million.

Verticals of Index

Five aspects/verticals (covering 20 sectors and 100 indicators) were analysed for calculating MPI which are as follows:

Key Findings

  • In the Million+ category, Indore has emerged as the highest ranked municipality, followed by Surat and Bhopal.
  • In the Less than Million category, New Delhi Municipal Council has emerged as the leader, followed by Tirupati and Gandhinagar.

Ease of Living Index 2020

Ease of Living Index is aimed at providing a holistic view of Indian cities-beginning from the services provided by local bodies, the effectiveness of the administration, the outcomes generated through these services in terms of the liveability within cities and, finally, the citizen perception of these outcomes.

  • The Ease of Living Index 2020 has been computed for 111 cities of India. Of this total, 49 cities have a population of more than a million, whereas the remaining 62 cities are below one million.

Key Objectives

The key objectives of the Ease of Living Index are four-fold:

  1. generate information to guide evidence-based policy making;
  2. catalyse action to achieve broader developmental outcomes including the SDG;
  3. assess and compare the outcomes achieved from various urban policies and schemes; and
  4. obtain the perception of citizens about their view of the services provided by the city administration.

Citizen Perception Survey

The EoLI 2020 strengthens its scope by consolidating the framework with the addition of a Citizen Perception Survey in the index, holding a weightage of 30%.The Citizen Perception Survey (CPS) was undertaken to help validate citizens’ experience of their city in terms of service delivery. The assessment was conducted from 16th January 2020 till 20th March 2020. A total of 32.2 lakh citizens from 111 cities participated in the survey.

Key Findings

  • Bengaluru emerged as the top performer in the Million+ category, followed by Pune and Ahmedabad.
  • In the Less than Million category, Shimla was ranked the highest in ease of living, followed by Bhubaneshwar and Silvassa.

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