Kohima town gets ready for second assessment

Our Correspondent
Kohima, Jan. 29 (EMN): An orientation programme concerning the ease of living (EOL) and municipal performing index (MPI) organised by the Kohima Smart City office for departments was conducted on January 29 in the Kohima Municipal Council-Kohima Smart City Development Ltd. conference hall.

The programme is related to Nagaland state’s capital Kohima town being named the ‘second most unliveable city’ in India ranking 110th out of 111 cities on August 13 2018 on the Ease of Living Index conducted by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.

During the meeting on January 29, the departments were asked to submit a printed copy of the required data along with a forwarding letter from the department’s head, with appropriate authority signature on all the pages on or before February 5 2020.

Zakiekhotuo Kiso, office secretary of the KMC, asserted to Eastern Mirror that Kohima town was ranked 110th ‘because they failed to give certain data since it was not under the municipal and therefore they have called the entire concerned departments from water, health, education sector for the meeting.’

He claimed that Kohima as the ‘second most unliveable city’ was ‘far from ground reality as our city has improved in all the spheres like cleanliness where all the “colonies are very clean now” and we do not have stagnant drainages like other cities.’

The official claimed further that that the department has been coming up with ‘so many infrastructures like parking lots and the town hall and roads are also under renovations.’ “Under the smart city (project), we will be having more urban infrastructures and civic amenities,” he asserted.

Kiso said the main issue today is data collection as they need to know what projects the departments are engaged in, when they are likely to complete them, and what their next project is and so on.

The meeting was conducted to “brief them how they should give us the documents, how they should update their data regularly,” he said. He informed that the ministry has been asking for records for drop-out students from class 1-10 too for the past three years but 90% of the schools do not maintain such records except for successful students.

A city data portal for citizens will be launched during the second phase, where citizens can update information, he said.

The chief executive officer of the KSCDL, Kovi Meyase, also released a statement earlier claiming that “dismal ranking of Kohima city was not necessarily because of the lack of facilities and infrastructures but mainly because of lack of awareness among government agencies as well as citizens, lack of co-ordination between departments, lack of data in the departments and late submission of data which delayed compilation-sorting-final uploading.”

He appealed to the departments to give concerted efforts by providing the required data and information on time as the authorities prepare to face another assessment. He appealed to citizens also to actively participate in the survey through social media platforms, citizens’ app and interviews through random sample surveys to be conducted by the ministry as citizen’s perception in the surveys will have influence.