Towards a Conceptual Framework for the Development of Sustainable Development Indicators (SDIS) for an Urban Setup

Bruntland Commission's report led to popularization of notion of sustainability and a boom in the development of sustainable development indicators (SDIs). Numerous efforts have been made worldwide in constructing SDIs at global, national and local scales, but India has been lacking in such initiatives. Motivated by this dearth of studies and prevailing sustainability risks in million plus cities in India, this paper develops a SDI framework to assess sustainability resources for city of Mumbai. With a systematic consideration of sixteen SDI initiatives across the world, it reviews different SDI frameworks - their advantages, limitations and applications. A multi-view black box (MVBB) framework has been introduced by eliminating the system component from the extended urban metabolism model (EUMM) and introducing three-dimensional views of economic efficiency (EE-view), social wellbeing (SW-view), and ecological acceptability (EA-view). Important domain areas and sectors are identified and a model has been demonstrated applying MVBB framework on energy domain