Assessing Urban Infrastructure Service Delivery with Reference to Expenditure Norms: A Study of Two Indian Cities

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-685-2_21How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Urban infrastructure; Civic Service delivery; ULG Spending; Physical and financial norms

Abstract

India has been grappling with the challenge of providing urban infrastructure services in the wake of the rising levels of urbanisation and the increasing number of cities. Urban infrastructure service delivery norms have been developed in India from time to time so that the Urban Local Governments [ULGs] plan and implement infrastructure service provisioning while allocating adequate fiscal resources. These norms also aid in assessing civic infrastructure service delivery as well as estimating financial resource requirements to provide civic services. This paper attempts to examine whether large Indian cities spend adequately on the civic infrastructure services when compared to the corresponding expenditure norms. Based on the data collected from the ULGs of two large cities – Hyderabad and Pune – it assesses the adequacy of ULG spending on five major civic infrastructure services – water supply & sewerage, storm water drains, roads and streetlights – by comparing with the corresponding financial expenditure norms. The study finds that the study cities fall short of spending on some civic services like water supply and sewerage but they meet the expenditure norms of roads and streetlights. Pune fares better than Hyderabad when it comes to meeting expenditure norms. The results imply the need for better allocation of fiscal resources by the ULGs and better channelling of fiscal resources by the Central and State governments to the ULGs, as enshrined under the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ramakrishna Nallathiga
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/26
TI  - Assessing Urban Infrastructure Service Delivery with Reference to Expenditure Norms: A Study of Two Indian Cities
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Infrastructure Development and Sustainability (ICIDS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 382
EP  - 399
SN  - 3005-155X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-685-2_21
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-685-2_21
ID  - Nallathiga2026
ER  -