Nagpur: Despite rolling out an extensive suite of digital, GIS-driven and citizen-centric services, the Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) has been conspicuously excluded from the top five civic bodies in Maharashtra under the State’s much-publicised 150-day e-governance improvement programme, triggering serious questions over the credibility, transparency and fairness of the evaluation process.
The snub has caused visible disquiet within the civic administration, with senior officials openly questioning the opaque assessment mechanism adopted by the evaluation agency. According to NMC sources, neither individual scores nor a comparative performance matrix were shared with participating municipal corporations, leaving them in the dark about how rankings were determined.
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03 Feb 2026
As per the officially declared results, Panvel, Pune, Ulhasnagar, Navi Mumbai and Amravati secured the top positions. Notably absent from the list was Nagpur, one of Maharashtra’s largest urban bodies, a designated Smart City, and a key administrative centre, raising eyebrows across civic and governance circles.
Officials expressed astonishment at the outcome, pointing out that Nagpur had met, and in some cases exceeded, the programme’s objectives within the stipulated 150-day timeframe. The city implemented GIS-based property tax mapping, digital tagging of underground utilities and manholes, end-to-end online Right to Service delivery, real-time departmental dashboards, AI-powered chatbots, e-office systems, and WhatsApp-based citizen services, among other initiatives aimed at reducing human interface and improving service efficiency.
Senior officers contended that in critical areas such as GIS integration, automation and backend digital architecture, Nagpur’s systems were more advanced and operationally mature than those of several cities that made it to the top bracket. They alleged that the evaluation may have placed disproportionate emphasis on presentations and visual submissions, rather than on actual system deployment, citizen usage, and governance outcomes.
The absence of a publicly released evaluation methodology, parameter weightage, or detailed scorecard has only deepened mistrust, with officials arguing that without such disclosures, municipal corporations are denied a fair opportunity to assess shortcomings or improve performance. “When rankings are announced without data, they lose credibility,” a senior official remarked.
The episode has once again highlighted the growing disconnect between ground-level digital governance efforts and state-level performance branding, with critics warning that such non-transparent exercises risk undermining genuine reform and demoralising civic administrations that have invested heavily in technology-driven governance.
