The Performance Assessment System Project - www.pas.org.in (PAS) Project at CEPT University is a five-year Action Research Project, which works on developing appropriate tools and methods to measure, monitor and improve delivery of water and sanitation services in urban India. Funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Project covers all the 400 plus urban local bodies (ULBs) in Gujarat and Maharashtra, where operational and financial performance data on urban water supply and sanitation (UWSS) services is being collected annually. The PAS Project comprises three components of measurement, monitoring and improvement.

PAS web portal

The annual performance data collated by CEPT along with its partner institutes, Urban Management Centre (UMC) in Gujarat and All India Institute of Local Self Government (AIILSG) in Maharashtra is aligned with the Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India’s framework for Service Level Benchmarks (SLB) for measuring performance of water and sanitation service delivery in Indian cities. As per the recommendations of the Thirteenth Finance Commission, the local bodies in the country are required to put in place benchmarks for essential civic services and to report the standards to be achieved by the end of the following fiscal year on an annual basis and publish these standards in the State Gazette.

Urban water and sanitation services in Maharashtra

Dashboard showing performance indicators of water supply in Gujarat

The PAS database currently hosts data for four years for over 400 ULBs in Gujarat and Maharashtra. It is one of the largest databases on urban water and sanitation and is linked to the PAS web portal. The visualizations offer both overviews of the data at both state and city level and access to each city’s individual database. Various tools have been also developed by the PAS team to enable interactive analysis of data, and use the PAS information for performance improvement. The portal also showcases a range of knowledge products and reports developed under the Project.