New Delhi: The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) in its 2014 election manifesto announced of setting up 100 new smart cities across India. However, after forming the government at the center, the party seems to have changed its track.
Instead of building new smart cities, the Government launched a smart city mission under which the existing cities will be made smarter by infrastructural and technological interventions.
In an exclusive interaction with ETV Bharat, the director of National Institute of Urban Affairs, Jagan Shah, spoke in great detail about how the smart city mission has shaped up till now.
Under the smart city mission, Shah said, the government has strived for innovations that make the Indian cities smarter. "There are some cities which are developed and there are some which need overall planning," said Shah.
"In fact, the smart city is itself a new innovation," he said adding that the projection made in the manifesto did not get "translated."
The NIUA is a premier institute for research, capacity building, and dissemination of knowledge for the urban sector in India. NIUA has been assisted in policy formulation and programme appraisal and monitoring for the Ministry of Urban and Housing Affairs.
Shah said that more than 6000 projects in all 100 smart cities have been grounded so far. "20 billion dollar projects have been grounded. There is widespread acceptance of the methodology of projects. GIS and data have been used to create more evidence-based, decision-making system for the project implementation," said Shah.
Shah further said that Swacch Bharat Mission, another component of the smart city have sensitized people across India. "However, there still lack of knowledge in the community," said the NIUA director.
Most of the smart cities across India has already set up a Project Management Consultant (PMC) to implement smart city projects.
Except for West Bengal, all other states and union territories have been participating in the smart city mission. It is projected that the smart city mission will start showing results from 2022.
Centre and State Government will provide 1000 crore (with equal distribution of 500 crores each) funding to the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) to implant the smart city mission.
