New Delhi: Delhi has been ranked a dismal 111th out of 140 world cities in a latest global liveability study, pointing to the lack of urban planning across India’s polluted and chaotic cities. India’s capital shares the ranking with the Moroccan city of Casablanca in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) ‘Global Liveability Ranking’ released in London on Tuesday.
However, Delhi’s educational institutions can take pride in the fact that they helped rank the city at 80 alongside Shanghai in China. The ranking, which provides scores for lifestyle challenges in 140 cities worldwide, shows that since 2009 average liveability across the world has fallen by 0.7%, led by a 1.3% fall in the score for stability and safety.
The top five cities which made to the list are Melbourne, Vienna, Vancouver, Toronto, Adelaide and Calgary. Karachi in Pakistan and Dhaka in Bangladesh were the Asian countries that did not fare too well and ranked in the bottom 10 at 135 and 139 respectively.
“Recent conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have underlined continuing fallout from a decade of destabilising events ranging from the war in Iraq to the Palestinian Intifada and the Arab Spring,” the report says. Melbourne, Australia tops the ranking for the fourth year running, while Vienna, Austria is the top city in Europe and 2nd overall.
Despite featuring in the top tier of liveability, London’s score, weighed down by lower stability, is among the bottom three cities ranked in the European Union at 55. “Liveability trends tend to move slowly, so it is unsurprising to see little or no movement among the top ranked cities. But destabilisation has had a catastrophic impact for some cities with a possible knock-on effect in neighboring countries,” said Jon Copestake, editor of the survey.
EIU’s liveability rating, part of the ‘Worldwide Cost of Living Survey’, quantifies the challenges that might be presented to an individual’s lifestyle in 140 cities worldwide.
Each city is assigned a score for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories of stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure.