Minister of Urban Development M Venkaiah Naidu urged 23 cities, including Dehradun, to improve their smart city proposals by learning from the experience of the first batch of 20 cities to start work on the smart city mission.
Speaking at a workshop on next steps in the India smart city mission in Delhi, Naidu asked the first batch of 20 cities selected in the first round of smart city competition to launch their smart city projects by June 25 this year. Asserting that the competition was completely city neutral neither favouring nor discriminating against any participant city, he said that what mattered is not where a city stands now but where it likes to go and how it proposes to go based on a vision drawn from the inherent strengths of a city and backed by a credible action plan.
Of the 20 ranked cities, he said, “The lesser known Davanagere in Karnataka and Solapur in Maharashtra scored higher than the well known New Delhi Municipal Council. little known Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh did much better than the mighty Chennai in terms of ranks. I see no reason why Bhagalpur in Bihar, Ranchi in Jharkhand and Dehradun in Uttarakhand could not do what Belagavi in Karnataka did in coming out with a sound vision and a credible strategy to realise it and making it to the top 20”.
The union minister exhorted 23 cities including Dehradun to learn from the experiences of the first batch towns and made necessary improvements in their proposals.
It will be recalled that the smart city proposal submitted by Uttarakhand had raised a controversy and public opposition even before it was submitted to the Centre. Proposed to be built on tea-estate land, it was strongly opposed by political and public bodies alleging that the government intended to secure possession of tea-estate land on the pretext of smart city development. Though Chief Minister Harish Rawat had directed necessary adjustments in the proposal to placate public outcry, many in Dehradun were not saddened by rejection of Doon’s proposal. Since rejection of the State’s proposal, the CM and various departmental officials concerned are reported to have initiated efforts for making necessary improvements in the Dehradun smart city proposal. However, skeptics question whether the State authorities do actually intend to propose a project aimed at achieving the stated goals of the project or simply aim to secure considerable income from the real estate sector.