NITI Aayog under the Indo-German Cooperation releases inaugural SDG Urban Index and Dashboard 2021–22

What is the News?

Niti Aayog has released the first Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Urban India Index.

About SDG Urban India index

Developed by: Niti Aayog in collaboration with GIZ and BMZ under the umbrella of Indo-German Development Cooperation.

Purpose: It is an SDG progress monitoring tool at the Urban Local Bodies(ULB) level.

Methodology: For each SDG, the urban areas are ranked on a scale of 0-100. A score of 100 implies that the urban area has achieved the targets set for 2030; a score of 0 implies that it is the farthest from achieving the targets among the selected urban areas.

Categories: The areas with scores between 0 and 49 have been ranked as aspirants, those with 50-64 are termed as performers, 65-99 are called front-runners and the ones with perfect scores are called achievers. 

Significance: The index and dashboard will further strengthen SDG localization and institute robust SDG monitoring at the city level. 

What are the key rankings?

Not a single urban area has achieved a perfect score.

Top 10 Urban Areas: Shimla has topped the index. This was followed by Coimbatore, Chandigarh, Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Panaji, Pune, Tiruchirappalli, Ahmedabad and Nagpur. These ten urban areas have scored between 75.5 and 69.79 of 100 and are ranked as front-runners.

Bottom 10 urban areas: Dhanbad, Meerut, Itanagar, Guwahati, Patna, Jodhpur, Kohima, Agra, Kolkata and Faridabad. These areas have scored between 52.43 and 58.57 and are termed as ‘performers’. 

There are none in the ‘aspirant’ category with scores below 49.

Source: This post is based on the following articles 

• “NITI Aayog under the Indo-German Cooperation releases inaugural SDG Urban Index and Dashboard 2021–22” published in PIB on 23rd November 2021.
• “Shimla, Coimbatore, Chandigarh top Niti Aayog’s first SDG Urban India Index” published in Business Standard on 23rd Nov.2021.