Govt. asked 20 Selected cities to Launch Smart City Projects by 25th June

The Union Urban development Minister Mr. M Venkaiah Naidu in a workshop named ‘India Smart City Mission: Next Steps’ on Monday asked the selected 20 cities for the SmartCities Mission to unveil their respective smart city projects by 25^th June, 2016.

• Naidu said that the SmartCity Competition was completely neutral and no favoring or discrimination against any city. The basic criteria were implementation framework, result orientation, citizen participation, smartness of solutions, city vision and strategy etc.
• Referring to the top 20 ranked cities, Mr. Naidu noted that ‘lesser known Davanagere in Karnataka and Solpaur in Maharashtra scored higher than the well known New Delhi Municipal Council. Little known Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh did much better than the mighty Chennai in terms of ranks.”
• The Minister further said that “smart city competition is so designed to pick up the cities capable of making the smart city journey board the train first and every chosen city gets to do so after they are made worthy of such a journey over a period of 3 years”.
• Also asked the 23 cities like Warangal, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Bhagalpur, Dehradun etc. who are participating in the Fast Track competition to improve their proposals by learning from the experience of the first batch of 20 cities and asked the top 20 cities to get going by opernationalizing Special Purpose Vehicles and launching smart city projects.

(Source: PIB) 

Read: Smart Cities Mission- A Smart India Awaits