The Cities We Don’t See

Your street has a pothole you navigate every day. You may have complained about it — tagged someone, filed a request, waited. And if you live in an Indian city, you already know how that story ends. But has it ever occurred to you that this is, at its core, a financial problem? That somewhere in a budget, a line item either exists for your street or it doesn't — and that this information is, in theory, public? Urban India has always had a data problem. Not a shortage of it, but a shortage of data that is consistent, accessible, and presented in a form that means anything to the people it concerns. CityFinance was built to change that. As the national platform for municipal finance data, it tracks how India's cities raise money and where they spend it — cutting through the opacity that has long made urban governance feel like something that happens to citizens rather than for them. The session opens with a few questions about how cities are actually funded. The room will quickly discover how much or how little, most of us know about the financial machinery behind the places we live in. From there, we walk one city's financial story end to end. How much of what it spends comes from its own resources, and how much is simply waiting for a transfer from above? What share of every rupee is already committed before a single discretionary decision gets made? These are uncomfortable questions. The data has answers. We then open the floor. Call out any city in India and we pull it up live. Tell us what you see, what surprises you, what a better visualisation would look like, what story you would tell with this if you had a week and a deadline. You leave with a sharper financial lens on urban India — and with a clearer sense of the stories this data is still waiting for someone in this room to tell.