Creating Sustainable Urban Systems: Need for Redesigning Indicators for Urban Infrastructure and Services

The process of infrastructure project determination is often inadequate leading to outcomes that do not address the intended purpose and/or have unintended consequences. As the world and India commit towards charting a more sustainable development path, there is a need to take a ‘ relook’ at the outcomes of a project from a ‘sustainability’ perspective. This paper presents a framework which elaborates on key sustainable development principles in the context of urban development. It further presents the results of an assessment of a select set of indicators against this framework to gauge their usefulness in measuring the sustainability of urban infrastructure and services. The results show that a majority of indicators are loaded towards measuring the efficiency and well-being of urban infrastructure and services, with little attention paid to equity and foresight.