SDG Urban Index

November 27, 2021 Reference

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Urban Index and Dashboard for the year 2021-22 was announced by NITI Aayog. The index and dashboard were launched in collaboration with NITI Aayog GIZ and BMZ, which are focused on promoting the localization of the SDGs in Indian cities under the umbrella of development cooperation between India and Germany.

Highlights

The Urban Index and Dashboard evaluated 56 urban areas against 77 SDG indicators across 46 SDG Framework goals. The data collected for this indicator is from various official data sources like the NFHS, NCRB and data portals from various government ministries in India.

Objective of the index

The SDG Urban Index and Dashboard aim to further enhance the localization of the SDG and establish robust monitoring for sustainable development at the city level. Dashboards and Indexes reveal the weaknesses and strengths of ULB-level data, monitoring and reporting systems. The index also continues to help build an ecosystem where all stakeholders can implement and adopt data-driven decision making.

Features of the index

Of the 56 urban areas included in the SDG index, 44 have a population of over 1 million. Twelve cities in the index are state capitals with less than one million population. For some indicators, urban area refers to the ULB, while in others it refers collectively to all urban areas within that area. For each sustainable development goal, urban areas were scored from 0 to 100. A score of 100 means that the urban area has met the 2030 goal, and a score of 0 means that the area is the furthest from achieving the goal. Then, to measure the overall performance of the urban area, the overall value of the urban area is generated from the goal wise score.

Rankings

The top 10 cities in the index are

  1. Shimla,
  2. Coimbatore,
  3. Chandigarh,
  4. Thiruvananthapuram,
  5. Kochi,
  6. Panaji,
  7. Pune,
  8. Tiruchirappalli,
  9. Ahmedabad

The 10 lowest cities in the index are

  • Faridabad,
  • Kolkata,
  • Agra,
  • Kohima,
  • Jodhpur,
  • Patna,
  • Guwahati,
  • Itanagar,
  • Meerut
  • Dhanbad

These are the rankings for the year 2021-22.