Smart cities must first be inclusive cities

Ensure transparency before levying user charges for upgraded infrastructure

Last week, vice-president M Venkaiah Naidu, who was the NDA’s urban development minister before his elevation, said people must be prepared to pay higher taxes or user charges for smart cities. This burden will have to be borne by for availing “modern infrastructure in the existing ones,” he said in Ranchi. This may surprise many because to date the NDA has not explicitly said anything about such charges, but as things fall in place, they would probably be more open about it. The Smart Cities Mission (SCM) document, mentions the principles for levying user charges: Where services can be measured and beneficiaries identified; user charges could be levied for maintenance; and that it would be linked to improved quality of service.

As an earlier piece in these pages mentioned, the funds for these projects are raised from public and private sources; the primary part comes from the SCM budget. The mission offers cities ₹ 1,000 crore per city over five years, and this accounts for over 50% of the budget of the top 90 cities. The funding was initially imagined as seed money that could help cities venture into the debt market, however, this funding seems to be used more as a regular grant, wrote Persis Taraporevala, a research associate with the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. Over 20% of funding for the 90 cities is sourced through a process of ‘convergence’ wherein the cities incorporate the budgets of other government schemes into the SCM proposal budgets.

For citizens (who are already saddled with different kind of cesses), what would be of interest is the quantum of charges that would be levied on them and what is the Union government’s plan to ensure that these smart cities are affordable for all. Last but not the least, they would want the process of levying user charges and its collection to be transparent and accountable.