The agenda for urban reforms aims at making cities livable and competitivethrough better management and making the civic bodies more banakable.The four components of the new policy guidelines will include setting up ofa model accounting system, creation of a special incentive fund, time boundtariff reforms and a sustainable credit enhancement opportunities.

Speaking at the economic editors' conference here on Friday, minister forurban development Jagmohan said that a manual for the new agenda would soonbe ready for best practices to be followed by the municipal bodies.

``Another manual for creation of funds has already been drawn and thesurplus land will be used to mobilise resources to met the cost of thesewerage, sanitation and water supply projects'' Jagmohan added.

Even the private participation could be invited once the municipal bodieslearn to return handsome dividends, he said.

Till date no private party is ready to invest in municipal projects as anaverage investor considers such ventures as unviable.

The entire programme will be finalised by the end of the next year and thetechnical assistance for the various components will be formalised by theend of this month, he said.

Jagmohan also called for a change in the mindset towards urban developmentfrom one of being an elitist approach to that of a grass roots approach.``These objective could be achieved by leveraging limited governmentresources and benchmarking the performance of the local authorities'', hesaid adding that the benchmarking could be achieved through developingcitizen charter, service benchmarks and comparative assessment.

``Availability of funds is not a problem and capacity building should bedemand-led,'' minister said.

The Indian score card on financial intermediation in the urban financing waswholly owned by the government and were not market-driven. `` We need tointroduce a mechanism by which resources could be raised by the municipalbodies to meet the expenditures'', Jagmohan said.

For this, a new approach towards the urban financing needs to introducedunder which ``we all have to accustomise ourselves, we should learn to payfor the services availed,'' he added. The country faces a shortfall of Rs20,000 crore and this can be filled by levying and raising user charges,Jagmohan maintained.