It has been made abundantly clear in the guidelines that conceptualisation of a smart city varies from city to city; in our country there is no one way of defining a smart city. The government is not prescribing any particular model and the requirement is that each city has to formulate its own concept, vision, mission and plan, an exercise which is currently going on in the 98 listed cities and which will reach a stage of submission of the smart city proposal in the next three months. This will form the basis for determining which 20 cities will figure in the first list of smart cities and where implementation will get going.
For the common man's understanding it is clearly stated that a smart city will aim at one, providing core infrastructure; two, giving its citizens a decent quality of life; three, a clean and sustainable environment; and four, the application of "smart" solutions. How all this is to be done, and in what timeframe, is a choice the city itself will make. Everyone knows that we cannot make any city a fully smart city in a year's time or even in five. Consider one key area of urban service. We know that a little above 70 per cent of India's urban population has access to piped water supply within the premises they live in. So, first it is a question of providing access to drinking water within their premises to the remaining 30 per cent or so. This will mean investment, better management of water distribution and sound water management practices. Now, in some cities it may be possible to bring in smart techniques to manage the available bulk water better, make it reach the left out areas, improve supply hours, reduce leakages, have systems in position to promptly address consumer grievances, have metering and volumetric billing, while taking care of the economic status of the poorer sections and meeting all the service-level benchmarking requirements.
One of the key factors which will contribute to making a city smart is how active citizen engagement is. Currently, all the 98 cities are engaged in the process of consulting citizens, eliciting their views as to what they would like to see prioritised in the smart city plan. A logical extension would be to examine what avenues are available to the city residents to be continuously part of the execution process. To me this will be a critical factor, because the earlier programmes could not appropriately give the required space to the citizen both in the preparation of the city development plan and the subsequent implementation process.
Another critical factor will be what additional resources the city itself will be able to raise, beyond the Rs 1,000 crore which the Centre and state together will provide for the five-year period. This is where the linkage between what the city aspires to in terms of improvement in its basic infrastructure, and systems will be very important. Will the city be able to provide highly satisfactory basic services, thereby prompting residents to pay user charges for the facilities they receive? Can cities succeed in getting improved credit ratings and thereby be able to raise resources through municipal bonds and such other not-so-common sources? Can a new and different PPP regime come into existence whereby substantial investment happens in the infrastructure sector? Critical to this is whether states lay down a clear-cut and transparent policy, instilling confidence through an independent regulatory system. If borrowing from bilateral or multilateral organisations is lined up, if sufficient action has been initiated to tap the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund, then such cities stand a better chance of having additional resources. Convergence with other programmes like AMRUT has been underlined and it depends on the initiative and imagination of city managers as to how best this can be made to happen.
It will not be possible to improve the capacity of urban local bodies overnight. Cadre restructuring has to happen, with decisions emanating from state governments; but, till that materialises, where do cities go to take a whole lot of new initiatives? Just depending on consultants will not be sufficient. It is worth recalling that of the 599 projects sanctioned for the earlier Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, till recently only 243 - less than half - were completed. Similarly, in the small towns, of 1,000-plus projects approved, only close to 460 projects were completed. Lack of capacity, issues in implementation, even poor structuring of projects could be responsible for this; but we cannot continue to have a situation where projects meant for the public are approved and implementation has no fixed time period. This is again an area where enlightened public participation can bring about a substantial difference.
What is required is a smart way of implementing the challenging programmes announced, so that maximum benefits flow to a larger number of city residents - particularly the marginalised and weaker sections - so that the cities we live in become happier places for each resident, and citizens feel happy participating in the process of building a modern urban India.
The writer was secretary, ministry of urban development