Urban agglomerations need to measure ‘Quality of Life’
Authored by Saurabh Mehrotra, National Director - Valuation & Advisory, Knight Frank India.
India is growing. The evidence of our growing opulence can be seen across the urban landscape. We take pride in our growing per capita GDP and increasing proliferation of lifestyle gadgets reflecting our material wellbeing. On the other hand our small close door neighbor Bhutan, is teaching the world a different path, by measuring a Gross National Happiness Index, a measure of the ‘Quality of Life’ of its citizens.
Urban agglomerations like any enterprise operate in a competitive landscape. Like any other enterprise they go through a lifecycle phases of growth and decline. If we look around us, some of the Indian cities which were amongst the top 5 at the time of our Independence do not even appear in the list of top 10 today. Quality of life is one of the most important but often ignored, lead indicator of an upcoming growth or decline. An improving quality of life in an urban agglomeration triggers the growth spiral of attracting talent, driver industries and growing income. Whereas a Declining quality of life triggers a negative growth spiral.
In the existing urban competition, if Quality of life is taken as a lead indicator, we see early signs of large urban agglomerations of Mumbai and Delhi, losing the battle to emerging competition from cities like Ahmedabad. Pose this question to any inhabitant of a metro, and you will hear a similar response:
And the list can go on a on, ranging from increasing cost of living, to declining quality of civic infrastructure, to an increase in crime rate or to a noted decline in community life.
If Balanced Score Card is an approach widely accepted to measure an individual performance, its high time Indian municipalities / governance agencies adopt ‘Quality of Life’ as one of the measures of their performance. An independent measure of Quality of life, can empower an average citizen to rank the performance of their municipality so as to make informed democratic choices. It will also help corporates make informed decisions on location and relocations. Above all it will provide a barometer on comparative performance of urban agglomerations on a competitive landscape.
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