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India’s cities are notoriously non-transparent. Most of the 4,300 cities and towns in the country do not make available their annual budget for the public to review. But that may change soon. Five Indian cities Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Chennai and Vijayawada are acquiring a new global ISO standard that aims to standardize city data. They’ll join Pune and Surat, which have already committed to and begun publishing a variety of metrics related to city government performance in a globally comparable format under the Tata Trusts’ city data initiative. All the cities on the list happen to be smart cities, a government programme which has spawned an in-house livability index that is now pushing India’s leading cities to quantify where they stand on access to healthcare, quality of education, prevalence of violence and the extent of pollution.