An Urban Local Body (or) a Municipality is a critical and the most citizen-proximate governance layer in a federal structure. They usually perform a whole host of functions which are regulatory, administrative, service delivery oriented and impact the daily lives of their citizens.

Performance management and benchmarking of the Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) is critical for governments to know whether the outcomes of the public services provided by the ULBs meet the needs of the communities. This mechanism streamlines outcomes through fact-based decision making while providing the ULBs a chance to continually learn and improve their performances, thus driving the overall governance towards efficiency.

The key objectives of the benchmarking include:

• Establishing meaningful and measurable performance measures for a wide range of ULB service delivery and support areas
• Streamlining inconsistencies in data collection and representation
• Enable fact-based decision making within ULBs
• Encouraging continuous organizational learning, change & facilitate exchange of best practices
• Providing a strong empirical basis for targeting policy interventions in the State
• Empowering the elected representatives, staff, and citizens with information on their ULB's performance and how they compare with other ULBs

Athena has developed an in-house web based performance assessment tool to access the performance of 664 Urban Local Bodies on over 450 data parameters covering the whole gamut of urban services offered by the government of Tamil Nadu.

To learn more about this tool, please contact Deepa Karthykeyan at deepa.k@athenainfonomics.com.