Smart Cities: Cool Idea Sloppy Plans

In its haste to smarten 98 cities across the country, the Modi regime may create a set of new problems and end up with half-baked solutions, says Alam Srinivas.

- Alam Srinivas

Think of a global smart city and most will come up with the obvious names – London, New York, Mexico City and Singapore (though the latter is a country). However, when the International Community Forum (ICF), a New York-based think tank, announced its 2015 list of seven finalists, it didn’t include the above-mentioned large urban conglomerates. Apart from Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), the others were smaller. Unknown ones like Columbus (US), Ipswich (Australia) and New Taipei City (Taiwan).

In November this year, when Venkaiah Naidu, the minister for urban development, selects the first list of 20 cities, out of 98, which will initially become ‘intelligent’, it may spring a few surprises. What if the initial list comprises names like Namchi (Sikkim) with a population of just over 12,000, Kavaratti (Lakshadweep) with just over 11,000 people, and Pasighat (Arunachal pradesh) with a population of nearly 25,000? It will finally boil down to the ‘Smart City plan’ that the selected consultants design and devise for the various shortlisted cities.

herein lies the problem. In the hurry to implement the proposal, Naidu short circuited the process. The definition, vision and scope of a smart city was left vague as well as all-encompassing. The time required to achieve the objectives 

was squeezed to unreasonably short periods. As one of the consultancy firms, which refused to participate in the project, says, “the final outputs, in terms of city-specific blueprints and plans, may turn out to be a cut-and-paste job borrowed from global examples. There may be little or no innovations in it.”

NOT-SO-SMART VISION