Smart City plans should be made in consultation with people: Naidu

M.-Venkaiah-NaiduMinister of Urban Development Venkaiah Naidu said that a Smart City is what the citizens want their city to be and the city level plans should be evolved based on extensive consultations with them.

“Smart City plans will be evaluated in the second stage of City Challenge competition based on such consultations and their economic and environmental impacts. The plans will be broadly assessed for the extent and quality of citizen participation and their economic and environmental impacts,” the minister said.

The plans are to be submitted to the Urban Development Ministry in the next three months for evaluation.

The Minister said that for realising the India growth story, the urban areas of the country need to be improved in terms of infrastructure, urban governance to enhance business and economic activity and quality of life.

The Urban Development Minister said that a paradigm shift has been introduced to enable the success of new urban development initiatives based on the learning of the past, including the implementation of JNNURM. Elaborating on the essential features of this new approach, Naidu said, “These include bottom-up planning based on citizen participation, complete autonomy to states and UTs in project proposal, appraisal and approval, selection of cities and towns under new urban missions based on objective criteria, convergence of different schemes to enable integrated planning and better utilisation of resources for visible impact on ground and unprecedented resource support to states and urban local bodies.”