‘Smart city’ initiative aims to improve ease-of-living in Indian urban areas
INDIAN Prime Minister Narendra Modi is touring Sweden, the UK and Germany. This is his first visit to Sweden as well as a visit by an Indian prime minister after three decades. With Sweden’s Stefan Löfven, Modi co-hosted a summit between India and the Nordic countries. In the UK, he attended the Commonwealth Heads of Government Summit (CHOGM), before stopping over in Berlin.
India enjoys a close and constructive relationship with these countries; they have been trusted and reliable long-term partners in India’s quest for prosperity and sustainable development, and instrumental in addressing the needs arising from the process.
Partnership in national flagship programmes such as Make in India, Startup India, Digital India, Clean India and Smart Cities Mission is contributing to their achieving key objectives.
Readers may already be aware of Make in India and Clean India, which have been covered in this column earlier.
Ably complementing these is another initiative aimed at changing the urban landscape in India – Smart Cities Mission.
The mission was launched on June 25, 2015 to promote urban centres that provide core infrastructure and give a decent quality of life to its citizens, a clean and sustainable environment through the application of “smart” solutions.
The programme also focuses on sustainable and inclusive development. The idea is to create a selfsustaining and replicable model in urban development and management, a critical requirement in a country the size of India.
The core infrastructure elements in a smart city would include adequate water supply, assured electricity supply, sanitation, including solid waste management, efficient urban mobility and public transport, affordable housing, especially for the poor, robust IT connectivity and digitalisation, good governance, especially e-governance and citizen participation, sustainable environment, safety and security of citizens, particularly women, children and the elderly, and health and education.
Harnessing existing and cutting-edge technology in achieving these objectives is implicit.
In terms of strategy, the mission focuses on city improvement (retrofitting), city renewal (redevelopment) and city extension (greenfield development) besides a pan-city initiative in which smart solutions are applied to most of the operations in a city.
Retrofitting will introduce planning in an existing built-up area to make it more efficient and liveable. In retrofitting, an area consisting of more than 500 acres (1 235 hectares) will be identified by the city in consultation with citizens.
Redevelopment will affect a replacement of the existing built-up environment and enable co-creation of a new layout with enhanced infrastructure using mixed-land use and increased density.
Redevelopment envisages an area of more than 150 acres, identified by urban local bodies in consultation with citizens.
Greenfield development will introduce most of the smart solutions in a previously vacant area (more than 250 acres) using innovative planning, plan financing and plan implementation tools (e.g. land pooling/land reconstitution) with provision for affordable housing, especially for the poor.
Pan-city development envisages application of selected smart solutions to the existing city-wide infrastructure. The application of smart solutions will involve the use of technology, information and data to make infrastructure and services better.
Examples of this could be an intelligent traffic management system to reduce average commute time or cost for citizens, waste water recycling and smart metering, etc.
The selection process of Smart Cities follows a challenge process to select cities. One hundred smart cities have been distributed among the provinces and federally administered areas in India on the basis of an equitable criteria.
The selection process is transparent and encourages cities to develop a healthy competition. A reward system ensures performers have an incentive to do better.
Monitoring at three levels – national, provincial and city – is being conducted to ensure the plans and projects are executed as per the mandate. The Smart City Mission Dashboard on the website of the Ministry in charge of the project keeps track of the progress on realtime basis.
Another initiative called Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) aims to supplement the activities undertaken in the Smart Cities Mission by providing basic civic amenities like water supply, sewerage, urban transport, and parks as to improve the quality of life for all, especially the poor and the underprivileged. The mission covers 500 cities, including all urban areas with a population of over 100 000 with notified municipalities.
Around one-third of the total population in India lives in urban areas with the proportion growing every year. It is not only imperative but also necessary to improve urban areas and make them sustainable growth nodes.
Rightly so, several agreements focusing on Smart Cities have been signed during the PM’s ongoing visits. These include encouraging the India-Sweden Business Leaders Round Table to further strengthen India-Sweden business co-operation within smart cities, digitisation, skills development and defence, exchange knowledge and explore co-operation on smart cities, including transit-oriented urban development, air pollution control, waste management, waste-to-energy, waste-water treatment, district cooling and circular economy, including through dialogue and capacity building.
The Green Growth Equity Fund (GGEF), a joint initiative by the governments of India and the UK under India’s flagship National Investment and Infrastructure Fund, will invest in sectors such as clean transportation and water and waste management, and work together on smart urbanisation.
After success in increasing the Ease of Doing Business ranking, the effort is now to improve ease of living for the citizens of India.