Urban Quality of Life: An assessment and ranking for Indian cities

The holistic development of an urban area includes many dimensions, including access to basic amenities, infrastructure, transportation, opportunities, and environmental conditions. There are a few studies that assess holistic growth and define the Quality of Life (QoL) considering some of these dimensions. In today's world, transportation plays a vital role in accessing all the opportunities for an individual, but not all studies use it for assessing QoL. Moreover, no study has considered gender role for QoL assessment. In this paper, the Urban Quality of Life (UQoL) score is developed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to quantify the relative holistic urban development of 14 cities in India using 29 indicators grouped into seven components. The seven components resulted in seven indices: 1) Basic amenities index, 2) Economic development index, 3) Safety and security index, 4) Transportation access index, 5) Environmental impact index, 6) Infrastructure development index, and 7) Gender role index. It is found that the indicators corresponding to the transportation access index have higher variation compared to other indicators. The indices are combined to obtain the UQoL score, and the 14 cities are ranked. Greater Mumbai topped the chart, whereas Patna is at the bottom. Mumbai is followed by Delhi, Kolkata, and Chennai in the rank; Mumbai and Delhi have comparable UQoL scores. Indore, Jaipur, Lucknow, and Bhopal are other cities at the bottom and have comparable UQoL scores. It was found that the transportation access index has the highest contribution to UQoL, compared to other indices. Gender Role Index (GRI) contributed significantly to UQoL, and it was found that the ranks of six cities would have been different if GRI indicators were not considered. This study gives significant insights to the urban planners on the policy decisions that improve the UQoL in the respective cities.