‘City Finance Rankings 2022’ Portal Goes Live, Centre Invites Urban Local Bodies To Participate

Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) on Monday (20 March) launched the ‘City Finance Rankings 2022’ portal.

The portal will allow the Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) across the country to participate in the rankings through an entirely digital, 100 per cent paperless, process.

The ‘City Finance Rankings 2022’ have been launched with the objective of evaluating, recognising and rewarding municipal bodies across the country on the basis of the quality of their current financial health and improvement over time in financial performance.

As per the guidelines of ‘City Finance Rankings 2022’, which had been launched by Union Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Singh Puri, in December last year, the participating ULBs will be evaluated on 15 indicators across three key municipal finance assessment parameters, including resource mobilisation, expenditure performance and fiscal governance.

The cities will be ranked on the basis of their scores under any one of the following four population categories: (i) Above 4 million (ii) Between 1-4 million (iii) 100K to 1 million (iv) Less than 100,000.

The top three cities in each population category will be recognised and rewarded at the national level as well as within each state/state cluster.

The participating ULBs can submit the required data/documents (including audited accounts, annual budgets, and self-reported performance metrics) through the online facility created on www.cityfinance.in.

Quality Control of India (QCI) as the Project Monitoring Unit will provide handholding support to ULBs/states during the data collection process.

After verification and validation of the data, the final rankings are expected to be announced in the month of July 2023.

According to the ministry, the City Finance Rankings will provide critical insights to policy makers into the state of finances of urban local bodies.

ULBs will also stand to benefit by participating in the fiscal rankings as they will be able to evaluate their own performance vis-à-vis other cities, which will motivate them for improvement in future, the ministry said.