Civil society members question NDMC's selection for Smart City

Civil society members have raised questions over selection of New Delhi Municipal Council, which accounts for only 3 per cent of the area and population of the national capital, for the Smart City project claiming that the actual process differed from the prescribed procedure.
Making its cut through a rigorous competition, NDMC area is among the 20 cities which were announced winners of the Central Government's Smart City Challenge last month.
The Delhi Housing Rights Task Force (DHRTF), a collective of individuals and organisations, working to protect and promote human rights of adequate housing, has raised concerns over non availability of any information of other proposals received from Delhi.

The national capital has five municipal bodies-Municipal Corporations of North, South and East Delhi; the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) and the Delhi Cantonment Board.
"No other proposal seems to be considered from Delhi which represents a significant lost opportunity to seek central support in areas that reflect pressing needs of city. No other information exists in the public domain about why no other proposals were developed," said Shivani Chaudhry, member of DHRTF.
Another member Gautam claimed, "There was no adequate consultation as it was laid out in the prescribed guidelines of the Smart Cities mission. The submitted proposal by NDMC is still not available in public domain".

"While claims have been made of consultative meetings in different areas including JJ clusters and informal settlements, but we visited over 30 informal settlements and could not find a single locality where such a consultation has taken place," he alleged.

"Given that NDMC is one of the richest municipalities in
Delhi and given that other areas in Delhi face serious problems of poverty, housing shortage, inadequate living conditions and absence of basic services, both NDMC and centre need to explain this selection over other parts of Delhi," Gautam said.
NDMC area, which is home to the high and mighty in the country, has been selected among the 20 cities of the Union Urban Development Ministry's Smart City initiative, enabling it to receive a funding of Rs 500 crore for various projects.

The civic-body will get a funding of Rs 200 crore in the first year for implementation of the project and the remaining funds will be released in subsequent four years. Besides, it had allocated over Rs 400 crore for various projects under Smart City in its budget for 2016-17.
The selected proposal cited that the projects to be undertaken by NDMC have been divided into two broad categories - 29 area-based projects and 9 pan-city projects.
One major initiative under the area-based projects will be transformation of electric poles into smart poles with LEDs having incident-driven controllers, communication infrastructure, WiFi access points, air-quality sensors and noise-pollution sensors.