Assessment of social sustainable development in urban India by a composite index

Abstract India has experienced rapid urbanisation with the rate growing from 26 percent in the 1990–2000 decade, to 30 percent in the 2000–2010 decade putting massive pressure on basic infrastructure and services. The objective of this paper is to develop a social sustainable framework and a composite index which is tailor-made to assess the Indian cities. Since social sustainability cannot be developed in isolation this paper examines urban sustainability in an integrated manner with its four dimensions of social, economic, environmental and institutional and maps the criteria at three levels i.e. policy, theoretical, and practical levels. The three tiered hierarchical model is tested in the state of Odisha where the social sustainability can be put to test in the best context as the urbanisation is growing at a stupendous speed and the infrastructure growth does not match up. Using the framework it is possible to obtain a composite index for Urban Social Sustainability whose model can be applied to all Indian cities with contextual changes. The dimensional index score and thematic index score obtained from the model helps in benchmarking the cities and identifying gaps so that it can inform national policy and planning. The social sustainability index together with the indices on the other three dimensions would help in making well informed judgement in the allocation of resources.