Citizen Satisfaction and Infrastructure Performance in a Tier-II Indian City: Evidence from a Household Survey in Nagpur, Maharashtra

Abstract

Abstract As India's intermediate and Tier-II cities continue to expand, municipal authorities face growing pressure to sustain reliable basic infrastructure alongside larger transport and investment projects. For most residents, however, a city is judged less by flagship schemes than by whether the road outside the house holds up after the monsoon, whether the tap runs on schedule, whether the bins are emptied, and whether the street floods when it rains hard. This paper reports findings from a household survey of 750 respondents, drawn in equal numbers of 75 from each of the ten administrative zones of Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC), Maharashtra, on perceptions of four such services: local roads, drinking water, solid waste collection and stormwater drainage. The picture that emerges is uneven rather than uniformly poor. Drinking water is the clear high point: in every one of the ten zones, more than 83 percent of households describe themselves as satisfied or very satisfied. Solid waste collection reaches nearly all households, though on an alternate-day rather than daily schedule in most zones. Local roads are treated as usable but middling “fair" is the single most common rating everywhere, ahead of "good" or "excellent." Stormwater drainage is the weak link: most households call it somewhat effective during heavy rain, but very few call it very effective, and a meaningful minority in every zone report it as ineffective. Read together, these patterns suggest that Nagpur's infrastructure challenge has shifted from basic coverage which appears largely achieved toward consistency, maintenance and resilience. The paper argues that citizen satisfaction data is a useful complement to, but not a substitute for, engineering and administrative performance measures, and closes with governance recommendations centred on ward-level road maintenance, more frequent waste collection in dense wards, catchment-based drainage management, and a standing mechanism for citizen feedback.