Soon, you can decide how much money your city should get

To begin with, the benchmarks will pertain to five basic issues: water supply, drainage, sewerage, urban transport and solid waste management. The cities will have to meet the benchmarks created by the ministry to be able to access Central funds.

8220;What we have done is connect the benchmark project to funds to be released under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. Cities will receive funds for major infrastructural projects if they meet with the minimum standards,8221; said Urban Development Secretary M Ramachandran.

Residents will be able to rate their cities through a sample survey which the ministry will make mandatory. 8220;While we will be ranking the performance of the city ourselves, it makes sense that the residents rank their city8217;s performance as they are the beneficiaries of the civic services. We felt a need to impose these benchmarks on the cities as while the metros are growing, the quality of life is not keeping pace with the growth due to lack of efficient services,8221;added Ramachandran.

Senior officials point out that the benchmarks will mean more than just better civic services. 8220;What the Ministry aims to do is to eventually come out with a city report card. This official city report card will also enable both potential residents as well as investors, both domestic and international, to chose the city they want to either live or invest in. If you want to study in a particular university in the US, there is a system of rating which helps you choose. This is a similar system,8221;say officials.

The Standardised Service Level Benchmarks SSLBs, as the scheme is called, will measure service-level performance and 8220;reflect change of performance over a period of time8221;. Institutionalised through JNNURM, they will form an integral part of the city development planning processes both for assessment of the current situation and for setting targets under city plans.

The ministry has also proposed a system of incentives and penalties for attaining targeted performance levels. Penalties will be imposed not only on the city administration in cases of water-logging or long traffic jams, penalties will also be imposed on the errant staff 8220;who have led to poor performance in civic infrastructure.8221;

The standards will cover waste water management, household-level coverage of solid waste, segregation of solid waste into biodegradable and recyclable waste, scientific disposal of waste, incidence of water logging/flooding in the city and the extent of air and noise pollution.

One of the key areas that the ministry will be focusing on is that of Urban Transport which has an extensive list of performance standards including traffic density and congestion along key corridors, passenger comfort on public transport modes, fatality rate, injury rate, pedestrian infrastructure and parking availability.

The transport infrastructure efficiency of each city government will also be ranked on the basis of the average travel speed of vehicles on arterial roads, the number of vehicles along the corridor, number of signals per kilometer, the average intersection delay that commuters have to face and the number of fatalities and injuries recorded in road accidents.