Centre brings in 20-20 model to improve lagging smart cities

smart cities

To boost up Smart City Mission, the Government of India devised a 20-20 model according to which top 20 cities will be paired with the bottom 20 cities. The arrangement is made in such a way that it would initiate knowledge sharing among the cities and provide a chance to the laggard cities for adapting best practices from their partner cities.

smart cities

In a bid to implement the model successfully, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) has launched a 100-day challenge for the cities lagging behind to improve their position by June 25, 5th anniversary of Smart Cities Mission.

Under the Centre’s Smart Cities Mission, 100 smart cities have been shortlisted through a competitive process comprised of four different rounds. Around 80 percent of the 5,151 projects have been tendered and around 60 percent of them have been completed. Although, some cities worked on the projects more efficiently and delivered outstanding results but, some cities did not perform well.

The cities listed in the bottom 20 tendered barely 10 percent of the projects. Therefore, in a 100-day challenge which the government launched to improve the performance of cities lagging behind, the top 20 smart cities would be supporting the bottom ones.

The cities paired will be signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and the pairs are named as “sister cities”. This agreement will be valid for a tenure of one year. The sister cities will work on troubleshooting the problems and issues together. They would provide its partner the access to technical and financial studies, including detailed project reports, feasibility studies and impact assessments for better implementation of solutions.

Ahmedabad, which topped smart city rankings has been paired with Chandigarh which is ranked 81. Port Blair standing on 96th position has been given Nagpur, which is rank 2. On the similar line a few other cities have been paired such as Tirupur (rank 3) with Silvassa (87), Ranchi (rank 4) with Shimla (92), Bhopal (rank 5) with Aizawl (rank 82), Surat (rank 6) with Saharanpur (91) and more.