The ‘Queen of Hills’ Shimla has bagged the first rank in Niti Aayog’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) index survey 2021-22 whose report was released on Tuesday evening.
The Niti Aayog had conducted a survey in 56 cities of the countries on performance in SDG index in which social, economic and environmental criteria had been included and Shimla had been ranked first.
State Urban Development Minister Suresh Bhardwaj said Niti Aayog had released rankings for urban areas and Shimla bagging the first rank in the SDG index was a big achievement for Himachal Pradesh.
“Various development works have been carried out in Shimla under Smart City and Amrut Mission and many works are on the verge of completion.
The state government will make efforts to ensure that the capital city Shimla continues to remain among top-ranking cities of the country,” he added.
He stated that Shimla had bagged a score of 75.50 on SDG index and dashboard which is the result of the NITI Aayog-GIZ and BMZ collaboration focused on driving SDG localization in cities under the umbrella of Indo-German Development Cooperation.
It is worth mentioning here that the SDG Urban Index and Dashboard had ranked 56 urban areas on 77 SDG indicators across 46 targets of the framework. The data on these indicators have been sourced from official data sources such as NFHS, NCRB, U-DISE, data portals of various ministries, and other government data sources.
The index and dashboard will further strengthen SDG localization and institute robust SDG monitoring at the city level.
The SDG index has been created to highlight the strengths and gaps of ULB-level data, monitoring, and reporting systems which will contribute to the creation of an ecosystem in which all stakeholders will be equipped to adopt and implement data-driven decision making.