 "Know Your Smart City: Odisha")
In the 11th part of the ‘Know Your Smart City’ web series on the 98 cities that have been shortlisted to be equipped with modern facilities and innovative solutions over time, we look at the two cities Odisha.
Bhubaneswar
The capital of Odisha and popularly known as the temple city, Bhubaneswar was designed by the German architect Otto Konigsberger in 1946. Apart from Chandigarh and Jamshedpur, it is one of the first planned cities of India. An emerging information technology and education hub, Bhubaneswar is one of the country’s fastest-developing cities. A Comprehensive Development Plan (CDP), 2010, is in place to create a world-class city. CDP has a proposal for an investment of Rs 29,500 crore, of which Rs 15,000 crore will be public investment and the rest will come from private sources. The state government has already initiated steps to have Wi-Fi across the city.
Raurkela
Located in the western part of Odisha, Raurkela is popularly known as Ispat Nagar. At an elevation of about 219 metres above mean sea level, the steel city has Raurkela Steel Plant (RSP), the first integrated steel plant in India’s public sector, set up with German collaboration, with an installed capacity of one million tonnes in the early 1960s. The city also houses a National Institutes of Technology (NIT). The steel township and fertiliser township are under the steel plant’s administration, while the other sections of the city are under the Raurkela Municipal Corporation, which got the status of corporation in 2014.