Pune tops in improved quality governance: Survey

New Delhi, March 14 (IANS) Pune has emerged as the top city to show improvement in quality of governance, according to a survey released on Wednesday.

The other cities that came in the top five include Kolkata, Thiruvananthapuram, Bhubaneswar and Surat while Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Dehradun, Patna and Chennai constituted the bottom five cities, said the survey conducted by Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy.

Janaagraha released its 5th edition of its 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.

"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," said Anil Nair, Deputy Head, Advocacy and Reforms at Janaagraha.

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

"Significant delay in 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 formation of ward committees, gender representation in the council etc," said Janaagraha in a statement.

"The report underlines the need for sharp focus on city-systems or institutional reforms to city governance in our cities. This indicates slow progress on fixing city-systems which is worrisome given the pace at which India is urbanising and the already poor state of public service delivery in our cities," it added.