Deviating from the tradition of analysing the city in totality, this year’s Environment Status Report (ESR) of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has gone in for a ward-wise analysis of the city. This model has been adopted from the Cities Environment Reports On Internet (CEROI), “which has been accepted worldwide as standard and one of the best known indicator system,” says the report.

The 14 wards in the city have been dissected on the basis of seven parameters including development, demography, water, wastewater, traffic and transportation, environment and solid waste.

When contacted, manager of Air Quality Management cell of PMC, Dr Ajay Ojha said, “It is perhaps for the first time that an ESR has used concept of sustainable indicators. The intention behind this was to see which ward was lacking and which one was ahead in various aspects. Such an analysis will make the city’s development easier to carry out.”

Rating the wards on the basis of development as a parameter, sub-parameters like household density, electricity consumption, tax dues and storm water lines were taken into account.

The reports says that in terms of overall development Bhavani Peth and Vishrambaug was ahead of the rest and “there seems to be an urgent need to out-migrate the resources to other wards especially Sangamwadi, Warje and Dhankawadi to have uniform development and resource allocation so that the city as a whole flourishes in a polycentric way rather than in a centric way leading to decongestion and better facilities.”

As far as the overall traffic and transportation scenario is concerned, Karve Road is rated the “best” followed by Sahakarnagar, Sangamwadi, Bibwewadi, Warje and Hadapsar. The sub-parameters taken into account for this are vehicular density per kilometer of the road length of the ward. While the Ghole Road ward tops the chart, Sahakarnagar, Bibwewadi and Sangamwadi is minimum (vehicles to road ratio being minimum).

Bhavani Peth, Karve Road, Dhankawadi have the maximum distance of roads covered with footpath whereas Hadapsar, Ghole Road and Vishrambaug have almost about 60 per cent roads with footpaths. Dhole Patil, Bibwewadi and Tilak Road have less than 20 per cent footpaths.

While mentioning that 600 to 800 vehicles are added on city roads everyday, the report states that the city transport utility has only 32 buses per lakh population, whereas the ratio should be 40 buses per lakh.

On the water supply front, the report clearly says: “The water distribution is not uniform across the city such that almost 50 per cent of the wards are being over supplied whereas the others may have below standard consumption.