Centre to finalise concept of Smart Cities with states, says Naidu

A meeting of secretaries of states and UTs convened on Jan 30-31 to discuss the initiative

The Centre will meet secretaries of state governments and union territories starting from Jan 30 to give a final shape to the smart cities development plan, said Union Urban Development minister M Venkaiah Naidu.

Speaking at a conference on Tamil Nadu smart cities organised by the CII here today, he said, “During the meeting, we will give a final shape to the concept of smart cities,” and added at least four cities from each state would be covered under the plan.

The identified cities would be developed in partnership between Centre, state and urban local bodies and a public, private partnership (PPP) model, he said. The Centre will offer the viability gap funding (VGF) for taking up the works, he added.

During the meeting, issues including the kind of support, how to ensure citizen participation in urban governance, what kind of initiatives are needed to ensure good urban governance, kind of reforms that had been implemented under the JNNURM and reasons for inadequacies noticed and employment generation, will be raised, said Naidu.

Earlier this week, he noted the Centre had signed MoUs with the United States Trade and Development Agency for developing Visakhapatnam, Allahabad and Ajmer as smart cities. Germany too had agreed to develop three smart cities. The other interested countries include Japan, UK, Sweden, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Netherlands.

The Centre would establish a new task force to formulate action plans for these cities over the next three months, he said.

Besides, global companies like KPMG, Cisco, Infosys, IBM, GE, Honeywell, 3M, Timken and others have indicated their support to the initiative, said the minister.

As far as Tamil Nadu is concerned, Naidu said, Japan had shown interest to develop Ponneri as a smart city.

The Centre is also planning to roll out a ‘City Challenge’ initiative under which all the aspiring cities and towns will be evaluated based on progress on reforms front, revenue collection, sanitation, new initiatives, creditworthiness and rating of sanitation will be assessed, said the Union Minister, adding that to provide basic infrastructure in Urban areas alone would require around Rs 40 lakh crore over the next 20 years.

An additional Rs 20 lakh crore would be required for the operation & maintenance of urban assets during the same period, he added.