The Central government on Wednesday launched two major initiatives aimed at incentivising urban local bodies for improving cities' public infrastructure and strengthening them on basis of key financial parameters.

The City Finance Rankings 2022 and City Beauty Competition are the two initiatives which were launched by Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Puri.

While the City Finance Rankings has been launched to evaluate, recognise, and reward urban local bodies on the basis of their strength across key financial parameters, the City Beauty Competition aims to encourage and recognise the transformational efforts made by cities and wards in India to create beautiful, innovative and inclusive public spaces.

City Finance Rankings aim to motivate city and state officials and decision makers, to implement municipal finance reforms. The participating urban local bodies will be evaluated on 15 indicators across three key municipal finance assessment parameters like resource mobilisation, expenditure performance, and fiscal governance.

The cities will be ranked at the national level on the basis of their scores under any one of the following four population categories: above 40 lakh, between 10-40 lakh, 1 lakh to 10 lakh and less than one lakh.

The top three cities in each population category will be recognised and rewarded at the national level as well as within each state and state cluster, official sources said.

Under the City Beauty Competition, wards and public places of cities would be judged against the five broad pillars of accessibility, amenities, activities, aesthetics and ecology.

The competition would felicitate most beautiful wards and beautiful public places at the city level. While selected wards would be felicitated at the city and state levels, at the city level, most beautiful public places in cities like waterfronts, green spaces, tourist and heritage spaces and market and commercial places would be awarded first at the state and then shortlisted for an award at the national level.

About the idea behind the initiatives, Puri said that the thought came from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when he met the Chief Secretaries of all the states in June this year.

At that time, the Prime Minister had outlined a vision of a pan India ranking of the cities to foster a healthy competition among the municipal bodies in the matter of finances, Puri added.