The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) will announce the final set of 10 smart cities for funding under the Smart City Mission today. The Ministry will also release the “liveable Index” for smart cities across the country. The “liveable Index” will be a sort of guiding principle for setting up of smart cities that will generate the competition among special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to give their best so that the smart cities have all what is intended and implied in them.
Sources said that 15 cities had sent their proposals for inclusion in the list for funding under the smart cities mission. The cities are Itanagar (Arunachal Pradesh), Biharsharif (Bihar), Amravati (Maharashtra), Erode and Dindigul (Tamil Nadu) and Moradabad, Meerut, Shaharanpur, Bareilly, Rampur, Raebareli and Ghaziabad (Uttar Pradesh), Silvasa (Dadra and Nagar Haveli), Kavarati ( (lakshwadweep) and Diu (Daman and Diu).
According to officials of MoHUA, Union Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Singh Puri will announce the final set of 10 cities under smart cities mission taking the total number of such cities to 100.
Over 3000 projects worth Rs 1.40 lakh crore have been identified in the 90 cities selected so far. Projects worth more than Rs 20,000 crore are either under implementation or completed. Tenders for projects worth Rs 16,000 crore have been called, and more than Rs 1 lakh crore worth of projects are being readied for issuance of tenders. The 90 smart cities have proposed to leverage the fund by 2.5 times through internal revenue mobilisation, value capture financing, and municipal bonds among other things. The 100 Smart Cities Mission was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on June 25, 2015.
“This is also the first time that cities have created an institutional mechanism (SPV) at the city level. Till now 82 SPVs have been formed and considering the capacity gaps existing at cities, this is not a small achievement by any standards,” Puri had stated at a smart cities seminar early this week.