Budget 2014 Paves Way for BJP’s ‘100 Smart Cities’ Vision
Going according to its vision to build 100 Smart Cities in India, the Modi government, in its maiden annual budget, has allocated Rs 7,060 crore in the current fiscal towards building smart cities. There are already several industrial cities declared as part of this initiative across various industrial belts of the country. While ‘Smart Cities‘ is the buzzword everywhere and it has created a wave of the vision for futuristic India, one should know what a Smart City is.
What is a Smart City?
A city is considered ‘Smart’ based on six key criteria. They are transport and ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), economics, regional competitiveness, natural resources, human and social capital, quality of life and participation of citizens in city governance.
The first requirement for a Smart City is to identify the goal of a city. The master plan of the city will determine the physical aspects. The common infrastructure will be overlaid with a digital master plan, which will make the city technologically smart. The technology is then selected accordingly.
There are various elements involved in a Smart City. It should have smart power grids and smart meters, smart transportation, smart design and architecture, energy efficient buildings and construction materials. The local government should also focus on education, employment, entertainment and environment management. The focus should also be on providing integrated transport such as modern bus systems, metro rail, trams and bicycle tracks, while equal focus must be provided to waste management and garbage disposal.
Availability of talent, either trained or trainable, is required for a Smart City to be successful. A city is considered smart if it is defined by innovation and has an ability to solve its problems while using ICTs and its own resources to improve the capacity. According to experts, governance is the most important factor that defines the success of a Smart City more than anything else. Without the right policy and governance, a smart city will not be sustainable.
Examples of Smart Cities
There are numerous examples of Smart Cities across the world. The best example of Smart City is Songdo International Business District (IBD) in South Korea. It is built across a 1,500 acres of reclaimed land. It is situated about 65 km southwest of Seoul, the capital of South Korea and is connected to the Incheon International Airport by a 12.3 km reinforced concrete bridge. The city is the largest planned private real estate development. It is expected to contain about 80,000 apartments, 5 crore sq. ft. of office space and about 1 crore sq. ft. of retail space.
Computers have been built in houses, offices and streets as a part of wide area network. The Songdo IBD is being developed as a sustainable city with 40 per cent of the area reserved for green space. There are four universities in the IBD with a few more international universities planning to set up their satellite campuses there.
Few other examples of smart cities include Masdar City in UAE, Yokohama Smart City in Japan, Planit Valley in Portugal. Tianjin Eco City in China and Smarter Sustainable Dubuque in USA.
Proposed smart cities
The NDA-led government has proposed creating several industrial and smart cities across three major industrial corridors during its budget 2014-15. The master planning for Amritsar-Kolkata Industrial Corridor will be done in an efficient way for setting up industrial smart cities in the seven states along this corridor. These states include Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and West Bengal. Apart from this, master planning for three new smart cities along the Chennai-Bengaluru Industrial Corridor (CBIC) will be completed. These smart cities are Tumkur in Karnataka, Krishnapatnam in Andhra Pradesh and Ponneri in Tamil Nadu.
The perspective plan for Vizag-Chennai Corridor and Bengaluru-Mumbai Economic Corridor (BMEC) will be completed with provisions of creating 20 new industrial clusters in these belts. Kakinada, a port in Andhra Pradesh will be developed as the key driver of economic growth in the region as with an additional focus on hardware manufacturing.
