Centre to release report card of ‘Smart Cities’ in June 2020

The central government will release a report card of 100 selected smart cities in June 2020, as the Smart Cities Mission completes five years

The Union Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry has said that the centre will release a report card of 100 selected smart cities, to help the cities in better planning and moving towards data-driven governance that will eventually improve their liveability. Smart Cities’ mission director Kunal Kumar said that in June 2020, the ministry will come out with a ranking of smart cities in three categories – ‘ease of living index’, ‘performance of municipalities’ and ‘climate’.

He said in the category of climate, cities will be ranked based on their works in promoting matters related to the environment. The assessment for ease of living will be done on three parameters – quality of life, economic ability and sustainability. It will also include education, health, housing, mobility, safety, development, and economic opportunities. The verticals covered in municipal performance assessment will include services (30% weightage), finance (20%) technology (15%), planning (15%) and governance (20%).

(With inputs from Bunty Tyagi)

 


Only five per cent of proposed Smart City projects completed: Report

The ambitious Smart Cities mission of the government has ‘failed to make remarkable progress’, as only five per cent of the proposed projects have been completed so far, according to ANAROCK Property Consultants

July 17, 2018: Only two per cent of the Rs 9,943 crores released under the Smart Cities mission have been utilised and only five per cent of the proposed projects have been completed, so far, said ANAROCK Property Consultants. “Although the mission is trying to address these issues to a certain extent, the challenges of remodeling India’s tier-I cities into ‘smart cities’ are considerable, as many of them have reached their saturation point,” ANAROCK Property Consultants’ vice-chairman, Santhosh Kumar said. “This does raise questions about whether the development of smart cities by 2020, is a realistic expectation,” he said.

The Smart Cities mission, launched in 2015, aims to tackle the escalating problems in urban areas with regards to transportation, energy supply, governance, basic urban infrastructure services and overall quality of life. Kumar further said there are various bottlenecks, including land acquisition, buy-in from resistant stakeholders, among others, which are preventing the speedy implementation of these projects. “Apart from the slow implementation, it is also a fact that smart citizens are an integral part of the smart city ecosystem. With more active citizen participation in such government initiatives at the implementation and not only end-user level, the pace of smart city development in India could theoretically be faster,” Kumar added.

See also: Diu becomes the first Smart City to run completely on renewable energy during the daytime

According to ANAROCK, while many of the bigger cities have managed to enlist themselves under the Smart City scheme, it is, in fact, the smaller contenders who have managed to show visible progress. In the recent smart city rankings by the Ministry of Urban Development, the tier-2 smart cities of Nagpur, Vadodara and Ahmedabad topped the charts, leaving behind tier-1 cities such as Pune, Chennai and many others. “Smaller cities have more to gain from the Smart Cities program and a strong, determined local government can push the necessary reforms much more expediently there, than in the metros. Of course, the larger cities are invariably already massively congested, thereby, presenting huge roadblocks to the deployment of the requisite smart city ingredients,” he added.

 

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