Question

Smart Cities are the incubators of the New Urban India. Explain how smart cities will be engines of growth and sustainable development?

Answer 1

Approach:

• Challenges of urban india and need for Smart City Mission.
• Discuss how Smart Cities will help in making cities engines of growth and sustained development by solving those problems.
• Provide an appropriate conclusion.

In recent years, the question of how we can live a “smart” life has become the focus of everybody’s imagination. Growing population and rapid urbanization have forced large scale migration of people from rural to urban areas. This has resulted in heavy strain on energy, transportation, water, buildings and public spaces. Policy makers are trying hard to find ways and means to address these issues. Increasing need is being felt for “smart” city solutions which are both efficient and sustainable on one hand and can generate economic prosperity and social well-being on the other.

The Smart City Mission focuses on provision of core infrastructure services like adequate supply of clean water, sanitation, solid waste management, efficient urban mobility and public transportation, robust IT connectivity, affordable housing for the poor among other things. This ambitious programme of the Government to create 100 smart cities across the country is centered around the aim of ensuring smart and sustainable development based on inclusive growth. The Mission will cover 100 cities within five years from 2015-16 to 2019-2020. Inclusive in nature, such smart cities using latest IT tools for all-round development, will create further job opportunities for the urban poor and less privileged sections.

Sustainable, in reference to smart cities, is ideally about projects which implement ‘Green Building’ concepts within an existing city. Being an eco-friendly and sustainable township is also about recycling garbage to form compost for gardens, to create methane gas to power utilities, to harness wind and solar power to provide a part of power requirements. It is also about charging the water table through rain water harvesting, as also sewage treatment which provides treated sewage in form of water for gardens and construction/ cleaning purposes. It focuses on areas like air and water pollution control, sewage disposal, connectivity that ensures low pollution emissions on the roads, a maintenance and management system which includes e-governance and internet-based solutions for citizens and also using construction material that is ‘eco-friendly’.

Way forward:
​​​​​​​Aiming to provide state-of-the-art infrastructure facility and efficient service system using information and digital technologies, the Smart Cities Mission will provide the right fillip in bridging the social and economic divide. At the same time, instead of replicating Smart Cities of other nations, India needs to formulate its own strategies suitable to its own requirements. In implementing Smart Cities Project, India’s upper hand in technology, especially the IT sector and availability of skilled manpower in abundance are some of the advantages. With correct approach of its people, effective governance and doing away with corruption, India can hope to make Smart Cities as the incubators of the New Urban India and as engines of growth and sustained development.