Smart Cities

It was launched in 2015 by Ministry of Housing and Urban affairs with the objective of promoting smart cities that provide core infrastructure and give a decent quality of life to its citizens, a clean and sustainable environment and application of smart solutions.

• The strategic components of Smart City initiative are area-based development involving city improvement (retrofitting), city renewal (redevelopment) and city extension (Greenfield development) plus a Pan-city development in which Smart Solutions are applied covering larger parts of the city.
• 100 smart cities were selected and as per latest estimates (2019), 5151 projects have been approved.
• Smart Cities Digital Payment Awards has been launched in 2018 to guide, motivate, recognize, and reward the smart cities for promoting digital payments and carrying out innovative payment initiatives.
• Only 18% of the sanctioned projects have been completed till June, 2019 and the reasons for poor performance being –Ineffective Urban Local Bodies (ULBs), Fund constraints and long gestation periods in projects.

• Government must strive hard to overcome these follies by strengthening ULBs, coming up with innovative fund augmentation strategies, ensuring speedy administrative clearances etc.