Australia's second-largest city Melbourne has been rated the world's best city to live in, and India's Mumbai is one of the worst, according to a new survey.

In the survey of 140 cities around the globe, India’s financial capital Mumbai was ranked 116.

In 2010, Mumbai was ranked 117 while Delhi was 113. Delhi did not find a position in the Economic Intelligence Unit's new Global Liveability Survey.

Melbourne secured the top slot with a score of 97.5 per cent, followed by Austrian capital Vienna (97.4 per cent), and Vancouver in Canada (97.3 per cent) which was rated the best last year.

Three other Australian cities are in the top 10 including the country's capital Sydney, which ranked 6, while Perth and Adelaide jointly took the eighth slot.

Canada's Toronto secured the fourth position while Finland's capital Helsinki bagged the seventh place; Paris came 16th and Tokyo 18th; Hong Kong was ranked 31, San Francisco 51, as was Singapore, with both pipping London at 53 and New York at 56, the 'age.com.au' reported. In the Asian region, the giant Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai came in at 72nd and 79th positions respectively.

In the West Asia, the Libyan capital Tripoli, which has fallen under the control of rebel fighters in recent days, dived to 135th. Some of the other cities where livability was low were Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, Bangladesh's Dhaka and Zimbabwe's Harare.

According to the EIU, every city is assigned a rating of relative comfort for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories -- stability; healthcare; culture and environment; education; and infrastructure.

Each factor in a city is rated as acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable.

Read the report