Modi 2.0’s Smart Cities venture to rely heavily on public-private partnerships
Private players gearing up to be part of the change, as city development moves from being infrastructure-centric to people-centric.
As India gears up to transform 100 cities into smart centres, the government has called upon the industry to partner with them in this change. “I feel we need to set up a capacitybuilding platform which is on PublicPrivate Partnerships (PPP). There, the best of private and government expertise should collaborate to build a capacity within the urban ecosystem to solve the kind of the problems it faces. This can be done through leveraging financial technologies, digital technologies, and technologies which have emerged and are solving so many different problems across the world. That is going to be a very useful step going forward. We are working on the finance part and the capacity-building part, and see a very bright future on both the sides going forward,” said Kunal Kumar, Joint Secretary and Mission Director of Smart Cities, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. The government has allocated 30 billion dollars towards the upgrade of the cities, an amount which will be utilized over the next five years. “More than half of this will come from different private and public sources, which is a financial innovation in itself. PPP will be around 21 percent (40,000 crore); there are investments coming in from land monetization and loans. In the last three years, we have seen about nine municipal corporations and bodies raising municipal bonds,” Kumar added. Private players want longer tenure of government officials To make this a success, private players who have partnered with the government in the Smart Cities mission have asked for longer tenures for government officials looking after the projects. Said Som Satsangi, Managing Director of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE): “This is a very ambitious project initiated by our Prime Minister. When we are working on a project and it gains momentum, if the CEO gets changed, it stalls the pace. If there is a way in which we can define that some of the core team members who are involved in the project can have a longer term of service, we can do wonders.” The government, on the other hand, wants the industry to develop solutions for specific developmental problems being faced by smart cities. The project will see a lot of involvement of private players and industry, which will go hand in hand with the policy changes being initiated by the government. “I think there is a lot of investment which is needed in the private sector, to look at citizen-centric and city-centric solutions. Sometimes, vendors come to meet us and say I have a solution, tell me a problem that can be solved by that solution. They should, on the contrary, be asking to build for a solution the problem for it,” and said offering Kumar. He feels that the change in mindset will only come if smart cities detailing what is smart and how people are going to be at the center of it get deepened within the private sector. Smart Cities initiative gaining momentum As part of the Smart Cities venture, cities will be governed by special bodies called Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) for the first time. Some of the cities include Pune, Jaipur, Jabalpur, Vishakhapatnam, Coimbatore, Guwahati, Dehradun, Patna, Allahabad, Gandhinagar, Shimla, Saharanpur, and Diu. The process has already begun. “If you look at the progress, extensive citizen engagement has happened; about 70 per cent of the tenders are out and about half of this is actually being implemented on the ground,” Kumar said. Tech giants like HPE are gearing up to be a part of the change. “Our company is going to invest 500 million dollars in India over the next few years. This investment is completely aligned with the Smart Cities objective and will go into core technologies like e-health, e-education, and e-agriculture. We are creating state-of-the-art centres for some of the core technologies required from the Smart Cities perspective,” Satsangi added.