NSO | Workshop on Sustainable Development Goal 11

PIB News update:National Statistical Office (NSO), Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation along with UN-Habitat, is hosting a workshop on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 (Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable), during 23rd – 26th September, 2019 in New Delhi. The workshop was inaugurated by Shri Pravin Srivastava, Chief Statistician of India and Secretary, MoSPI. The delegates came from the National Statistical Offices of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Kyrgyzstan, Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Kenya and UK and also had experts from UN-Habitat and European Commission. The Workshop is focusing on evolving a standardized definition of Rural and Urban habitations and sensitizing the participants on the developments taking place globally so that the member countries can adapt these definitions to suit the national requirements. The participants are being briefed about the new metric, Degree of Urbanization (DEGURBA), which is a classification that indicates the character of an area, based on the share of local population living in urban clusters and in urban centers. The main goal of the workshop is to introduce the new metric DEGURBA approach to city definition and get direct feedback from the participating countries on its applicability, need for adaptation and customization as per their national needs.

2.         The experts explained that the definition of city is not uniform across countries and this poses a challenge and an opportunity for the collection of statistics at national / regional level. The workshop will largely focus on gaining momentum for having a global definition of city to support the SDGs monitoring on a comparable framework, on SDG 11 indicators and the applicable methodologies for their measurement and to explore the feasibility for adopting City Prosperity Initiative (CPI), a tool to measure the sustainability of cities. The measurement approach will be useful for urban planning as also for census operations.