A city’s budget provides a good insight into the priorities and plans of the city administration, and therefore can be used to understand the city’s sectoral priorities as well as whether the proposed expenditures are in sync with the goals, policies and plans of the city. Therefore, it is also important that the budget should be easily accessible and understandable to a common citizen as this will increase accountability and transparency of the city administration. Ideally, citizens should be able to access and understand not only the budget but only the actual expenditure on different sectors and the resultant outcomes in those sectors. However, to the best of our knowledge, such information is currently not provided by any city in the country including Pune.

Parisar has analyzed the budget of Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) for the year 2011-12 for the following: the budgetary trends over the last few years, the sectoral priorities of PMC,general accounting practices of PMC and the ease of understanding the budget by common citizens by a method developed by Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA).

Parisar representatives were invited to make presentations at the "National Conference on Urban Policy and Planning: A Case Perspective of Pune" organized by the Symbiosis School of Economics in February 2011. Read more to see these presentations.

Ranjit Gadgil made a presentation about pedestrian woes and non-motorized transport in the city. His presentation explained the close relationship between pedestrian facilities and livability of a city. He also talked about the troubles of a pedestrian in Pune and the importance of having street design guidelines to ensure that pedestrian infrastructure is adequate, convenient and standardized. Download his presentation here.

Ashok Sreenivas talked about urban transport in Pune. His talk demonstrated the increasing divergence between accepted principles of sustainable transport and the existing National Urban Transport Policy on the one hand, and the ground reality of Pune. He also touched upon some key reasons for why such a divergence was taking place and what was required to correct it. Download his presentation here.

Parisar has recently completed two detailed studies on the metro rail proposal for Pune. The first was a preliminary analysis of whether Pune needs a metro rail system and the second analyzed in detail the decision making processes in approving Pune's metro rail proposal as well as the detailed project report (DPR) of the metro rail proposal.

Parisar did a walkability study of Pune to evaluate how friendly the city is towards pedestrians. This study was done on behalf of Clean Air Initiative - Asia (CAI) as part of their Asia-wide study of pedestrian infrastructure. The study was based on a toolkit developed by CAI. Not surprisingly, the results of the study show that there is a significant room for improvement in Pune's pedestrian facilities.