Pune at top, Kolkata 2nd best city in governance

New Delhi: When it comes to quality of governance, Pune is at the top followed by Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal, which is led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. It has been revealed in a survey conducted by Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy on Wednesday.

The other cities that came in the top five include Thiruvananthapuram, Bhubaneswar and Surat while Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Dehradun, Patna and Chennai constituted the bottom five cities.

According to the findings of the 5th edition of Janaagraha's Annual Survey of India's City-Systems (ASICS), which evaluated the quality of governance in 23 major cities across 20 states based on 89 questions, Kolkata has improved a lot from the previous year as the city has reached the second position from third in the latest survey.

Interestingly, Thiruvananthapuram, which was at the top in last year's survey, has slipped to the third position while Pune which on the second slot has secured top position in quality of governance.

Commenting on the findings of the survey, Janaagraha's Anil Nair said, "ASICS does not measure quality of infrastructure and services such as roads and traffic, garbage, water, housing, sanitation and air pollution but instead measure the preparedness of cities to deliver high-quality standards, municipal finance and staffing, political leadership at the city level and transparency and citizen participation."

According to the study, Bhubaneswar stood out for showing steady improvement and moving six positions to fourth this year from the tenth position in 2016 while two new cities added this year -- Guwahati and Vishakhapatnam -- showed disappointing results.

"Significant delay in the conduct of council elections in Vishakhapatnam and Chennai pulled down the scores in these cities because this also have a cascading effect on aspects such as the formation of ward committees, gender representation in the council etc," said Nair.

The key finding of the survey is that India's cities are improving at a snail's pace, scoring between 3 and 5.1 out of 10 in the City-Systems framework.

Global benchmark cities like London and New York score 8.8 on the same framework of evaluation, while Johannesburg, a city in a similarly placed developing country of South Africa, scored 7.6.