The guessing game on which would be the 13th Smart city in UP – Rae Bareli or Meerut, rages on. Interestingly, CM Akhilesh Yadav wants both. He wants that both should be included in the list of cities charted by the Government of India to be developed as Smart City.
In a letter to Union Urban Development minister, Venkaiah Naidu early this week, Yadav said that UP should get 14 Smart Cities by virtue of it being biggest state in the county and hence should have the biggest pie in the development cake. “Uttar Pradesh is home to over 21 crore people and the state government is doing its bit to improve infrastructure. But being cash starved, the state is not getting the desired results. If the Union government includes more cities under the Smart City plan, then the face of the state will change soon,” Yadav wrote in his letter.
Incidentally, the UP Government itself had earlier sent the list of 13 cities to the Centre for developing them as Smart Cities. This included Meerut as one of the eight cities of west UP. Other cities were - Ghaziabad Aligarh, Saharanpur, Moradabad, Bareilly, Agra, Rampur, Varanasi, Jhansi, Allahabad, lucknow and Kanpur. The list of cities was finalised by a high-powered steering committee formed under the Smart City Mission
But when hue and cry was raised and Congress demanded that Rae Bareli (the Parliamentary constituency of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi) be included in the list, the Akhilesh government included Rae Bareli in the list. It then resulted in a toss up between Meerut and Rae Bareli with the Centre asking the UP government to select one of them. “Both the cities have their importance. One cannot ignore the historic importance of Meerut as it was the focal point of India’s first war of independence. Similarly, Rae Bareli has been important too. The Union government should include both cities in the list of Smart Cities,” said Yadav and added: “When we can have 13 Smart Cities, we can have 14 too.”
The Union cabinet has set aside Rs 48,000 crores for developing 100 Smart Cities across 21 states in the next five years. These were picked up on the basis of functional toilets, online complaint redressal system, monthly e-magazine, project-wise revenue generated out of municipal budget spend information, penalty imposed for delay in service delivery, internal revenue generated during the last three years etc. The other parameters included salary payment, audit, fee and consumer charge, percentage share of rent and other revenue resources, tax revenue, percentage of water supply and monitoring cost, city-level Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNRUM) reforms and completion of projects under JNNRUM approved up to March 2012, among others.