The Smart Cities Mission aims to develop and modernise 100 cities across the country, making them citizen-friendly and sustainable
The Ministry of Urban Development is responsible for implementing the mission in collaboration with state governments, and selected cities will be allocated 10 billion over a span of five years. Since it was launched in June 2015, 33 cities have been chosen to be supported by the Smart Cities Mission.
Many companies have expressed enthusiasm about the initiative, which if successful, has the potential to have far reaching effects across the whole country, and offers huge scope for UK-India partnership.
The Smart Cities Mission links well with the Prime Minister’s “Digital India” programme, as he looks to build them around the latest optical fibre networks.
“Cities in the past were built on riverbanks. They are now built along highways. But in the future, they will be built based on availability of optical fibre networks and next-generation infrastructure,” he said, upon launching the Mission.
The programme is already well under way, with smart cities already appearing all over the country, including Kochi Smart City, Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT) in Ahmedabad, Naya Raipur in Chhattisgarh, Lavasa in Maharashtra and Wave Infratech’s 4,500-acre smart city near New Delhi.
The wider aim is to create industrial corridors between India’s largest cities – Delhi-Mumbai, Chennai-Bangalore, and Bangalore-Mumbai. The more Smart Cities there are along these corridors – the further the spread of digital innovation. It is becoming clear that this a programme that, if successful, would piece together several parts of Modi’s vision of a ‘new India.’
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