The HCI creates an index that tracks the progress made in six broad categories of the Habitat II agenda namely Infrastructure, Poverty, Employme
A REVIEW of the commitments made by various countries in the run-up to Habitat III, the third United Nations conference on urban development and human settlements, shows that India has registered no improvement on its various urban development indices in the last 20 years.
The recently released Habitat Commitment Index (HCI), which tracks every country’s performance record as against the commitments made during Habitat II in Istanbaul in1996, shows that India has fared worse than other South Asian countries such as Pakistan and Nepal. Both these countries have gained over two points in the last two decades. India, on the other hand, has slipped marginally by 0.41 points on the HCI scale, way lower than the South Asian average of 1.26. The other countries included in the HCI analysis for South Asia include Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan.
Of all the indicators, India has registered negative scores on urban infrastructure and institutional capacity, two of the areas where it is today far worse-off than it was two decades ago. It has shown improvement on poverty scale and minimal increases on sustainability front. Another area of improvement has been on the goal of “formulating and strengthening policies and practices to promote the full and equal participation of women in human settlements planning and decision-making”. The report, however, notes that while gender inequality has been on the agenda for the Indian government, “traditional patriarchal norms continue to dominate society, where women are relegated to secondary status in the household and workplace.”
UN member states will agree on the New Urban Agenda at Habitat III, scheduled to be held in Quito in October this year. In the run-up to the event, the review of each country’s score on the previous urban agenda was released by the New York based Global Urban Futures Project.
The HCI creates an index that tracks the progress made in six broad categories of the Habitat II agenda namely Infrastructure, Poverty, Employment, Sustainability, Institutional Capacity, and Gender. Instead of comparing absolute outcomes between countries of varying levels of economic development, the outcomes are adjusted for resource difference, as measured by per capita GDP.
“India, with a population of over one billion people, has had virtually no change in the last 20 years in the HCI score,” the report says, ....