The Performance Delusion: India's City Rankings Paradox

In recent years, Indian cities have become subjects of constant assessment and ranking. Government programs and independent organizations now produce 'multiple city rankings' evaluating everything from cleanliness to ease of living to civic systems. The rationale of city ranking is compelling, as any systematic measurement can potentially enable evidence-based policymaking and strengthen city governments’ accountability to citizens. Competitive pressure between cities can also facilitate improvements in urban services. In principle, rankings offer a powerful tool for urban transformation.

Yet, this metrics-driven optimism obscures a troubling reality. Indore is a city that has topped consistently the Swachh Survekshan rankings as India's cleanest city and also figured in the top bracket of ease of living index. The water contamination crisis in Indore, reported to be caused by sewage leaking from a poorly constructed toilet into drinking water pipelines, exposes the dangerous gap between ranked performance and actual availability of urban basic services. This disconnect raises a crucial question - are our urban performance metrics measuring genuine progress or concealing real problems?

The Disconnect: Rankings and Urban Realities

In practice, city ranking assessments often measure what can be easily counted rather than what fundamentally matters. Tangible outputs – for example, installation of infrastructural facilities, deployment of vehicles, number of waste collection points are weighted heavily in ranking frameworks. For these outputs, cities self-report performance data and external agencies independently verify the same parameters. Research studies, however, reported surprisingly weak correlation between self-assessment and independent observation. Such discrepancies indicate either systematic misreporting of service metrics by the cities or differences in assessment methods measuring fundamentally different realities. Environmental policy organizations have also documented how rankings reward visible cleanliness over effective waste management. Cities maintain aesthetically clean streets while disposing untreated waste in poorly managed landfills and still earn top rankings.

The Ease of Living Index claims to measure affordable housing, traffic congestion, air quality, and climate resilience. Yet every major city in India, including 10 most livable cities in 2025, faces devastating floods annually; traffic congestion adversely affects productivity and health and affordable housing remains a distant dream for millions. Similar contradiction emerges, for example, in case of Swachh Survekshan's approach to measure capacity building. One of the indicators that the survey uses to award scores is completion of at least four online training modules by the sanitary inspectors. However, this indicator becomes almost meaningless in cities struggling with acute staff shortages. In smaller cities, particularly, the problem is not inadequate training but inadequate staffing.

One serious problem with the rankings exercises is that cities are evaluated for outcomes for which they lack adequate resources or authority to deliver. Even after more than three decades of the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act (CAA), devolution of functional responsibilities to the city governments remains incomplete. Multiple authorities, including state parastatals and private entities, continue to operate at the city level for provisioning of urban services. City governments lack genuine autonomy to make decisions and capacity to act on such decisions. This creates overlapping jurisdictions and contested authority, making it difficult to assign credit or blame based on service outcomes.

The ranking exercises acknowledge, in paper, the importance of citizen participation in city governance. But the reality is something different. The 74th CAA mandates constitution of Ward Committees in cities to facilitate the peoples' participation in local development plans and programs. These committees are meant to serve as a principal mechanism for transparency and accountability at the city level. As per the Annual Survey of India’s City System (2023) report, ward committees are active in only 22 percent of our cities. Where they exist, unelected members often dominate, discussions center on individual benefits rather than holistic development, and people often do not have platforms for meaningful participation. In most cities, ranking exercises capture citizen participation through online feedback mechanisms and apps. For example, apart from face-to-face mode, the Swachh Survekshan survey collects citizen feedback through apps like My Gov, Vote For Your City or QR code-based responses or via the1969 help line. Such practices systematically exclude the digitally disconnected people and the very communities most dependent on municipal services.

Lessons from Indore

The Indore tragedy not only exposes the faultiness of ranking exercises but also manifests failure of city governments on multiple fronts – inability to maintain basic infrastructure, poor inter-governmental coordination and slow response to citizen complaints about water quality. A 2019 audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General documented that nearly nine lakh residents across Madhya Pradesh's major cities were receiving contaminated water. The same audit noted over five lakh reported cases of waterborne diseases during a five-year period ending 2018.

Ranking framework centers on aspects like number of water connections, aesthetic cleanliness and rewards their digital documentation as these are easy to measure. Concurrently, the framework misses the dimension of safe water availability or equitable service access that is difficult to capture, yet genuinely shapes peoples’ quality of life, particularly the most vulnerable.

Cities understandably engage with the ranking exercises by optimizing whatever gets scored, often cosmetic interventions, rather than contemplating service delivery improvements and building sustainable capacity. So, it is hardly surprising that Indore receives accolades for urban cleanliness or livability, but cannot ensure its most elementary civic function of provisioning of safe drinking water. Infrastructure inventories and digital documentation driven ranking framework can mislead policymakers and citizens about how cities actually function. High scores create complacency that problems are resolved when fundamental challenges persist. Moreover, cities facing genuine difficulties but lacking capacity for effective self-presentation receive low scores that further stymie their development.

Beyond Ranking: Building Accountable Cities

Nonetheless, given the scarcity of city-level information, systematic data collection on urban outcomes remains valuable and necessary and more so for evidence-based policy making. City ranking frameworks partly contribute to urban data generation. However, it is imperative to move beyond simplistic ranking exercises that obscure more than they reveal.

First, the assessment framework must acknowledge the dimensions that crucially determine quality of life. Disparate aspects, for example, equitable delivery of urban services, properly planned maintenance of infrastructural facilities, long-term environmental consequences of prevailing urban practices and resilience against climate disasters should inform the methodological improvement needed to make the ranking exercise more realistic.

Second, cities should maintain publicly accessible data, disaggregated by localities and demographic groups, on service delivery outcomes that determine whether cities actually function well for their residents.

Third, rather than comparative hierarchies, the assessment framework should track how individual cities progress over time relative to their own baselines and locally relevant targets. This approach would reward substantive improvement instead of strategic pursuit of higher scores in specific dimensions.

Finally, accountability is the key to better local governance. This requires institutional changes beyond reform in ranking methodologies. Cities need adequate financial resources, genuine administrative autonomy, and clear authority over services for which they face evaluation.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of ETV Bharat)

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