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Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to announce 20 winners of the government’s flagship ‘smart cities mission’ before the Republic Day next month, a senior official in the Ministry of Urban Development said.
In August this year, the government had announced 98 cities shortlisted for the second stage of the smart cities challenge to secure funding from the Centre. Aspirants have to submit their smart city proposals by December 15, 2015.
Selection teams“The Ministry is in the process of setting up three teams which will go through all the proposals and evaluate them. Each team will include an urban planning expert as well as an economic expert with knowledge of resource mobilisation and management,” the official said.
The idea behind setting up three teams is to avoid any possible bias in selection and make it as objective as possible. “The three teams will judge each city proposal separately. The average of marks given by the three teams separately will be used for ranking top 20 cities,” the official added.
CriteriaProposals will be judged on credibility of implementation, city vision and strategy, economic and environmental impacts, cost effectiveness, innovation and scalability and processes followed, including citizen implementation.
The Centre will provide ₹200 crore per city in the first year, followed by ₹100 crore each year for the next three years to the top 20 cities. The remaining cities will be asked to address deficiencies before participating in second and third rounds of the challenge. As of November 30, 2015, over 15 lakh citizens have posted their comments, views and suggestions besides voting in response to various proposals of cities using ‘MyGov.in’.
According to the Smart City Mission Statement and Guidelines by the Ministry of Urban Development, the core infrastructure elements in a smart city would include adequate water supply, assured electricity supply, sanitation, including solid waste management, urban mobility and public transport, affordable housing, IT connectivity, sustainable environment, safety and security of citizens, health and education.
The Centre had in April approved an outlay of ₹48,000 crore for the smart cities mission.
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