Smart Cities Mission: Urban Retrofitting set in Big Goals

While the whole idea behind the Government of India’s Smart City mission was to enhance livelihood through sustainability and liveability, through a variety of developmental projects and initiatives, spread across 100 cities. This has raised its bar, opening up the further scope of sectoral research and development besides enhancing a healthy, competitive environment for improving livelihood, citizen experience. As the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs unveils the result of the 3rd Smart City Awards program, we delve deep to scrutinize further urban retrofitting. Poulami Chakraborty of BW Businessworld reports. 

As cliché as it may sound that the central government’s smart city mission is all about urban governance and retrofitting served together, however, the concept has gradually defined itself more than what was predicted for it. The 3rd Smart City Awards program that took place under the aegis of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs on the eve of their 6th Anniversary celebration on 25th March 2021 in a virtual platform, not only spotted and identified the front-runners' cities for ultimate execution of projects but also demarcated some of the core areas of intelligence and data-reading for bringing out smart cities seamlessly.

In a bid to commemorate the 6th Anniversary of Central Government’s Smart City Mission, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) organised an online event, wherein they not only issued India Smart City Awards 2020 but also highlighted some of the core initiatives being implemented under Smart Cities Mission. Chaired by Minister of State (Independent Charge), Housing and Urban Affairs, Hardeep Singh Puri, the online event was also graced by prominent policymakers from MoHUA including Secretary, Durga Shankar Mishra and Mission Director, Smart Cities Mission, Kunal Kumar among others.

During the program, the Central Government declared the India Smart Cities Award 2020, which was jointly grabbed by Indore in Madhya Pradesh and Surat in Gujarat for their overall developmental projects. On the other hand, Uttar Pradesh managed to secure for itself the title of ‘Smart State’. The award is hosted for the third time this year on a virtual platform, the earlier ones been given in Lucknow in 2018 & Vizag in 2019. 

The Progress So Far

As a mission that boosted a paradigm shift in urban transformation, a total of 5924 projects worth INR 1, 78,500 crores have been tendered out. Till now, work orders have been issued for a total of  5,236 projects worth INR 1,46,125 crores and about 2,665 projects worth INR 45,080 crores have also been fully completed and are operational as on 23 June 2021), says reports shared by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. 

Elaborating further about the success of the Smart Cities Mission Kunal Kumar, Mission Director, Smart Cities Mission, Government of India said, “This success is noteworthy for three reasons, namely, the total value of successful PPP projects, geographical spread across 57 cities and diverse sectoral mix of successful PPP projects.” According to him, the total value of successful PPP projects is 212 PPP which is worth ₹ 24,964 crore which are already grounded in the Smart Cities Mission. 100 smart cities chosen for radical urban transformational framework, competed to complete several projects, for which they were awarded recently by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs

Kumar further added, “The completed projects so far is spread across 57 cities, both big and small, under the Smart City Mission. These successful PPP projects are across diverse domains.”

It is also noteworthy that the average monthly expenditure in the Smart Cities Mission has almost doubled in the last year, despite the challenges faced due to COVID. The efforts put by the team to start and continue construction activities even during challenging times was appreciated by Minister Hardeep Singh Puri and Secretary, MOHUA, Durga Shankar Mishra. 

The Awardees- Execution, Performance, Result

There isn’t any doubt about the fact the Smart Cities Awards be determined with a lot of parameters under consideration.  Declaring the Smart City Awardees for 2020, the Central government on Friday announced Indore in Madhya Pradesh and Surat in Gujarat as Joint winners for their overall development, while Uttar Pradesh on the other hand bagged the title of Smart State, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu under the Smart City award.

“The Awards were declared after scrutiny across the themes of Social Aspects, Governance, Culture, Urban Environment, Sanitation, Economy, Built Environment, Water, Urban Mobility and others”, asserted Kumar. Cities like Tumkuru, Tirupati have been applauded and awarded for keeping up their cultural heritage. On the other hand, Vadodra, Thane, Bhubaneshwar has been recognised for their excellent work in Governance while Indore, Gwalior and Chandigarh, given them credits for the restoration of their cultural heritage.

A special focus has been rendered to the Urban environment, built environment, water, sanitation and economy to retain the balance of developmental transformation and sustainability under the same chord.

Chaitanya Y Bhatt, CEO, Surat Smart City Development Limited in interaction with BW Businessworld, commented, “Surat, being one of the fastest-growing cities of India, understand that the existing development and infrastructure of the city, citizen's larger needs and problems. Surat Municipal Corporation along with Surat Smart City Development Limited has taken all necessary measures and adopted innovative practices to contain the spread of COVID-19, ever since Surat had its first case coming up. Also, Surat Municipal Corporation has adopted the rigorous TTT-IQ Strategy of Track, Test, Treat, Isolate and Quarantine.”

He further assured how the city administration along with Surat Smart City Development Limited has undertaken various IT and non-IT interventions to effectively contain the spread and improve the response. He said, “Surat has very expeditiously developed the “SMC COVID19 Tracker App” in just 48 hours as basic IT applications like Door to Door tracking for Solid Waste Management, GIS, Biometric Attendance System were developed under smart city projects. Monitoring of home quarantine adherence through Smart City Command & Control Centre & COVID-19 War Room.”

Projects developed under the Smart Cities Mission are multi-sectorial and mirror the aspirations of the local population. As on date, 70 Smart cities have developed and operationalized their Integrated Command and Control Centres (ICCCs) in the country. These operational ICCCs functioned as war-rooms for COVID management, and along with other smart infrastructure developed under the mission, helped cities in fighting the pandemic through information dissemination, improving communication, predictive analysis and supporting effective management. These are being developed across all 100 Smart Cities of the country.

Gaurang Rathi, Municipal Commissioner, Varanasi Municipal Corporation, another winner in the awards function credited it to strong internal team and team-building for their success story. He added, “We have focussed on strengthening our team internally, rather than hiring consultants. we have invested to build our resources to execute projects on our own and monitor it on a real-time basis.”

Rathi further confirmed that citizen engagement and involvement of citizen’s representative in the board of directors for Varanasi Smart City and related developmental projects. Rathi further asserted several challenges that they faced while implementing smart city in the region. “Dissemination of knowledge about projects across different domains along the lines of ‘Surakshit’, ‘Suramya’, ‘Swachcha’, ‘Nirmal’ and ‘Ekikrit Kashi’ (integrated), which we mitigated by electing and bringing on people’s representative in the Smart City Board. This in a way has enabled us to leverage citizen engagement experience”, said Gaurang Rathi.

He further added, “For us, the task was to retrofit the existing city built-up area with the development of state of the art infrastructure development for modern city beautification projects within a minimum of 50 acres of area.”

About Data Maturity Assessment Framework

One of the key component of assessing Smart cities under the Smart 

 City Mission is Data Maturity Assessment, the idea behind which was to push Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) to continue to invest in developing and strengthening their data ecosystems. Launched in November 2020, the 2nd cycle of the Data Maturity Assessment Framework was intended to implement Data-Smart Cities Strategy and gauge the readiness of cities in using Data Maturity Assessment within their framework.

All selected 100 Smart Cities actively participated in this exercise, enhancing their maturity and advancement in this direction. Out of 42 cities attaining the certification level - out of 4 cities, including Surat, Pimpri Chinchwad, Bhopal and Pune have been certified as ‘Connected’, 8 cities are at ‘Enabled’, 11 at ‘Explorer’ level and 19 cities at the ‘Initiator’ level. Rest 58 cities have commenced their data journey and are at a ‘Beginner’ level. 

Joint Secretary and Mission Director, Smart Cities, Kunal Kumar added: “MoHUA is committed to the continuous capacity building of the City Data Teams and of the country’s urban data ecosystem at large. Guideline on ‘Building Data Alliances’ was launched to facilitate cities in developing sustainable data alliances which can help unlock the combinatorial power of data and promote co-creation and innovation.” 

Needless to mention, these efforts on conducting city’s data policy will enable to transform citizen livelihood by enabling improved decision making and inclusive government. 

Conclusion

With a vivid scope for the elaborate spread of research and innovation-based urban development program, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has enhanced detailed developmental projects, which are at the research and development phase. An actual transformation of Indian cities to global standards within Indian geography and challenges might be an expectation not matching with our imagination. However, once these theories decoded for real-time implementation, livelihood, sustainability and resilience would show up for the charisma of urban retrofitting.