Pushing ahead with its smart-cities project, the Union government will kick-start the process of discussion with all states and Union territories on January 30 and 31. The government will meet the secretaries of state governments and Union Territories over the next two days. Speaking at a conference on Tamil Nadu smart cities organised by CII here on Thursday, Union urban development minister M Venkaiah Naidu said,
“During the meeting we will give final shape to the concept of smart cities and each state will have three such cities to start with, excluding the capital of the state.”
The smart cities will be developed through collaboration between Centre, state and urban local bodies and public-private partnership model. The Centre will give viability gap funding.
Earlier this week, the government had signed MoUs with the United States Trade and Development Agency for developing Visakhapatnam, Allahabad and Ajmer as smart cities. On Wednesday, Germany agreed to develop three more smart cities. Other countries showing interest include Japan, UK, Sweden, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Netherlands and others, he said. Global companies such as KPMG, Cisco, Infosys, IBM, GE, Honeywell, 3M, Timken and others have also shown interest. “Japan has shown interest to develop Ponneri as smart city,” he said.
The Centre is also planning to roll out a ‘City Challenge’ initiative, under which all aspiring cities and towns will be evaluated based on identified parameters. “In order to provide basic infrastructure in urban areas alone, the government would require around R40 lakh crore over the next 20 years. An additional R20 lakh crore for operation and maintenance of urban assets was required over the same period,” he said.