ICLEI’s initiatives in Amritsar and Ludhiana get a boost through the World Bank’s “Urban Transformation in Service Delivery in Amritsar and Ludhiana”, a project initiated by state Government of Punjab, in which ICLEI South Asia is assisting in developing an Environmental Management Action Plan.

Ludhiana- a prominent industrial hub known to be the small scale industrial capital of India, and Amritsar – a huge pilgrimage centre catering to about 100,00 pilgrims visiting the Golden temple daily, are the two largest cities in the northern state of Punjab, housing 30% of the total dwellers in the state. Both cities are disproportionately expanding and facing huge challenges in terms of civic infrastructure services, leading to the deterioration of their environmental quality. The project aims to assess both cities in terms of their environmental status, i.e. condition of their environmental resources (air, water, land, forests, etc.), sources of its pollution and identification of impacts of existing urban management practices. The next step will be to develop sustainable solutions that will enable innovative transformation in service delivery.

A State Level Workshop was recently organized by Punjab Municipal Infrastructure Development Corporation (PMIDC) at Chandigarh to introduce the government officials to the project and the project team. The workshop also intended to review the scope and timelines of the project and understand the expectations and requirements of the city officials from the project. 

The ICLEI South Asia project team has already begun the background study of the status of the municipal services and their impacts on environmental resources. A visit to the cities is planned in the next few weeks.