Pairing smart cities to help those lagging behind

With many of the 100 selected smart cities lagging behind, the Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry has decided to give them a leg up by pairing them with the best performing cities as ‘sister cities’.

It has drawn up a list of 20 best performing cities that will guide the 20 bottom cities as their ‘sister cities’ to speed up the facilities to their citizens and asked them to sign up a memorandum of understanding under the Smart City Mission launched in 2015. The mission is aimed at ensuring all-round developments of the cities with advanced facilities for their citizens.

In another initiative, the ministry is identifying five new smart cities as proposed by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her budget speech to develop them on the pattern of Gandhinagar’s Gujarat International Finance Tea-City (GIFT) to attract private investments in what would be the business districts dedicated to activities like manufacturing or a particular sector. GIFT was conceived as India’s first smart city and international financial services centre.

Varanasi, the city which is also Prime Minister Modi’s parliamentary constituency, will guide Amritsar lagging behind. Both are holy cities and Amritsar requires improvement in its performance, while Pune and Ranchi will help Dharamsala and Shimla in Himachal Pradesh.

The ministry has given the internal ranking to the 20 best performing cities that have to help those lagging behind. These are: Ahmedabad (1st rank), Nagpur, Tirupur, Ranchi, Bhopal, Surat, Kanpur, Indore, Visakhapatnam, Vellore, Vadodara, Nashik,

Agra, Varanasi, Davanagere, Kota, Pune, Udaipur, Dehradun and Amravati in Maharashtra.

Ahmedabad has been bracketed with Chandigarh to help promote the latter while Bhopal has to share its ideas with Mizoram’s capital city Aizawal while Visakhapatnam and Surat have to help Diu and Saharanpur respectively to improve their performance.

Officials said the “sister cities” will undertake a 100day of its announcement to enhance the ranks and performance of the bottom 20 cities.