‘City Finance Rankings, 2022’ portal goes live, MoHUA invites Urban Local Bodies to participate in the first of its kind initiative
The ‘City Finance Rankings 2022’ portal www.cityfinance.in/rankings has been made live by Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) on 20th March, 2023. The Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) across the country can now participate in the Rankings through an entirely digital, 100% paperless, process. The ‘City Finance Rankings 2022’ have been launched with the objective of evaluating, recognizing 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 Shri Hardeep Singh Puri, Hon’ble Minister Housing and Urban Development on December 28, 2022, the participating ULBs will be evaluated on 15 indicators across three key municipal finance assessment parameters, namely: (i) Resource Mobilization, (ii) Expenditure Performance and (iii) 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 3 cities in each population category will be recognized and rewarded at the national level as well as within each state/state cluster.
The last date for participating in the ‘City Finance Rankings 2022’ is 31st May, 2023. 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.
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.