Mumbai, Thiruvananthapuram and Kolkata have bagged the top three spots in the third Annual Survey of India’s City Systems (ASICS), which covers 21cities across 18 states. At the bottom is Chandigarh, which ranked last despite being one of our few planned cities, and surprisingly Bhubaneswar, recently ranked first in a `smart-cities’ listing released by the Union Ministry of Urban Development. While the fortunes of individual cities may rise and fall, the survey reveals three worrying trends about Indian cities.

First, all 21 Indian cities measured by the surveyors across 83 parameters scored very low (from 2-4.2 out of 10) compared with global benchmarks set by cities like London and New York (which scored 9.4 and 9.7, respectively). For a fast-urbanising country like India this is cause for serious concern. It demonstrates how urban governance is failing to keep up with change and indicates the urgent need for major reforms.

Second, Indian cities perform poorly because our urban governance interventions largely focus on symptoms like potholed roads, lack of 24×7 water or power and not the underlying systemic problems like flawed “legislations, policies, processes and practices that lie at the root of these issues“.

Most cities give elected representatives only a peripheral role in urban governance, have weak finances and don’t have evaluation mechanisms for their municipal plans. Bengaluru, for example, has 52% staff vacancies in municipal bodies while its expenditure is more than double of revenues. Delhi’s recent problems with safai karamcharis who agitated over salary payments also accrue from this basic problem. The third problem is management and staffing. Jaipur, for example, has had six commissioners in five years, Raipur eight. In Jaipur, a mayor or a councillor draws a lower salary than clerks, drivers, peons or sweepers. Cities are India’s future. It is time to fix their systemic problems with long-term vision and by devolving more powers to them.