NEW DELHI : Announcement of first batch of 20 Smart Cities early next month will be the high point of the major urban development initatives taken during the outgoing year.
Evaluation of Smart City Plans of 97 cities in the second stage of City Challenge competition is already in progress and the results will be announced shortly marking a high point in promoting competition among cities for resource allocation, the first of its kind, an official from the Ministry of Urban Development said.
97 cities out of the 98 included in the Smart City Mission have submitted Smart City Plans to the Ministry of Urban Development. A total of 85 cities have done so by the stipulated deadline of December 15.
The Telananga government wanted to replace Hyderabad by another city. Uttar Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir are still to nominate one city each for inclusion in the Smart City Mission. The Ministry of Urban Development has already set in motion the process of evaluation of city level Smart City Plans by setting of three teams of two experts each and the Plans received have been referred to them for evaluation in the second stage of City Challenge competition.
At the end of the evaluation, the first batch of Smart Cities to be financed during this financial year would be announced.
The Ministry has set a cap of 20 such cities to be financed during this financial year and 40 each during the next two years. As many as 30 foreign companies from 20 leading countries have been associated with preparation of smart city proposals of 45 mission cities.
These include KPMG, KcKinsey, CISCO Systems, Price Waterhouse Coopers, DeloiteToucheTohmastsu, Jones Lang La Salle, Dorsh Holding GmbH, Knight Frank, Tractabel Engineering SA, Haskoning DHV Consulting Pvt Ltd., Grant Thornton, Happold Engineers, Ecorys Netherlands BV among others.
Cities with which foreign companies were associated in preparation of smart city proposals include New Delhi Municipal Council, Agartala, Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Aurangabad, Bhagalpur, Bhabaneshwar, Bhopal, Greater Mumbai, Ghaziabad, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Pune, New Town Kolkata, Kota, Ranchi, Rourkela, Ujjain, Visakhapatnam, Tirupati, Tumakuru (Karnataka) among others. Total population of 98 mission cities is 13 crore accounting for 35 per cent of country’s urban population.
Eight of these have population of below one lakh each, three towns have population between one and two lakhs, 30 cities between 2 to 5 lakhs, 22 between 5 and 10 lakhs, 25 in the range of 10 to 25 lakhs, five between 25 and 50 lakhs and 5 cities have population above 50 lakhs.
Capital cities not included in Smart City Mission are Bengaluru, Gangtok, Itanagar, Kolkata, Patna, Shimla and Thiruvananthapuram.
The Union Government has reset the parameters for urban planning in the year 2015 and has approved an investment of about Rs 42,000 crore in 2015 for developing basic urban infrastructure and for affordable housing alone.
This includes Rs 19,170 crore for improving infrastructure relating to water supply, sewerage networks, storm water drains, urban transport and open spaces in 474 cities in 18 states under Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), launched in June this year.
Under another flagship programme of Prime Minister’s Awas Yojana (Urban), an investment of over Rs 22,000 crore has been approved in 2015 for construction of 4.25 lakh houses for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) in 227 cities in 11 states.
In the pursuit of enabling urban areas as more effective engines of high rate of economic growth besides making them more livable, the Government has put an end to ad-hocism in urban planning and resource allocation under new urban sector initiatives.
Under AMRUT, a detailed infrastructure gap analysis has been made mandatory for formulating Service Level Improvement Plans (SLIP) for each of the mission cities for allocation of central assistance from out of the five year kitty of Rs 50,000 crore.
A new beginning has also been made towards bottom up urban planning with mandatory consultations with citizens and other stakeholders in identification of projects and formulation of development plans under new urban missions.
While improvement of basic urban infrastructure is the objective of Atal Mission, Smart City Mission adopts area based development for enhancing quality of living by addressing core infrastructure deficit and adoption of smart solutions.
As against only Rs 38,000 crore provided as Central Assistance to states and urban local bodies under 10 years of JNNURM, the Government has committed itself to assist states to the tune of about Rs 4 lakh crore under AMRUT, Smart City Mission and for construction of 2 crore houses for urban poor under PMAY(Urban). (UNI)
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