Change My City – Civic Data, Citizen Engagement and Grievance Redressal Platform

Background and Summary

A web portal https://cityfinance.in/home has been launched to host financial information of Urban Local Bodies (ULBs). The portal is aimed at serving as a national database of city finances combining financial and operational information such as income, expenditure, assets, and liabilities.

Name of Partnering Agencies

Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship & Democracy (JCCD) in collaboration with Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs (MoHUA)

Period of Implementation

Design and Development: Jan 2019– June 2020

Portal went live in the month of June 2020

Area of Operation

The primary objective of CityFinance.in is to serve as a national framework of standardized, timely and credible financial information on cities, beginning with urban local bodies. We aspire to host financial statements in digital format for all the cities in India. This will lead to better evaluation of the performance of cities and promote a sense of competition and peer learning.

The information to be covered would in a phased manner include:

Already hosted on the portal:

• Balance sheet and income & expenditure information from annual accounts incomparable and downloadable format
• Municipal finance laws
• Details of municipal bond issuances
• Credit ratings and related reports for cities

Planned in future:

• Service level benchmarks
• Module for XV FC grant automation
• CAG and DLFA audit reports
• List of urban projects including PPP, tenders and schemes

Model RFPs, a compilation of best practices in revenue enhancement and digital learning modules.

Beneficiaries/Target Group

• Principal Secretaries (Urban development departments), Directors of Municipal Administration, Municipal Commissioners, Smart City CEOs
• Investors, Merchant Bankers, Project Consultants, Credit Rating Agencies & Banks, CSOs

Status Before Implementation

Financial statements from ULBs were mostly available in scanned PDF formats and that too on websites of ULBs. In most of the cases, these financial statements were not even in the public domain.

Status After Implementation

• Cost Reduction:
  Digitization and standardization of financial statements will make it easy for user to understand and compare performances of cities. Earlier, if someone intended to do this exercise they has to digitize and standardize the financial statements at their own cost.
• Corruption Reduction:
  Not applicable
• Service Improvement:
  Not applicable

Difficulties/Lessons Learnt

Compiling the database was an arduous task as quality of financial statements produced by ULBs needs a lot of improvement.

Current Status

Phase one of the portal has been launched. We are working on adding new features and improving the user experience and automating the process of standardization of financial statements.

Resource Requirements

• Physical Infrastructure:
  None
• Human Resource:
  3 Associates and 2 Associate manager/ manager were involved for creation of templates for standardization, SOP for data collection, development of concept & wireframes and standardization of financial statements.