"Moving towards Sustainable Cities" A study on the Municipal Budgeting process for Sustainable Urban Active Transport

Abstract: A municipal budget is a process of allocation of funds that acts as a benchmark to control fiscal operations which can serve as a guiding tool for the operations of the municipalities and municipal corporations. Furthermore, the budgeting process can assess the appropriateness of funding the various development projects and implementation of national or state-level schemes and policies at a level. Currently, in many of the developed countries across the globe, the promotion of local government for the management of urban development has been taking place. This shift in the paradigm of local governance is being emphasized to empower the urban local bodies and distribute power between the central and the state in the context of a broader interest in decentralization. This paper tries to understand the various processes through which different municipal corporations and municipalities formulate the annual session budgeting plans and their implementation in the transportation sector through the plethora of innovative projects. It tries to create an understanding of the municipal budgeting processes of various ULBs of different Indian cities and a comparative analysis made by assessing the funding and jurisdiction over the decision-making processes in an effort to provide greater devolution to the state and local representative bodies. The understanding gained would then be utilized to formulate a basic generalized framework of municipal budgeting in the urban transport field of the selected cities for the study to fulfil a variety of Sustainable Goals, specifically Sustainable Goal 11.