The National Urban Digital Mission (NUDM) has been launched by the Ministry for Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) to unlock the digital revolution and transform 4400+ Indian ULBs by 2024. This vision can only be realised by promoting collaboration across the entire urban ecosystem through effective and inclusive partnerships with member-representatives of the governments, civil society, industry, and academia. This urban innovation will be facilitated with shared public digital infrastructure via access to open platform architecture, standards and specifications.
The NUDM inherits the guiding principles of the National Urban Innovation Stack (NUIS)- Strategy and Approach paper, released by MoHUA in 2019 as a vehicle to accelerate the ecosystem for urban transformation. Towards actioning this vision, the Citizen-Centric Smart Governance (CCSG) Program is being operationalized by the Centre for Digital Governance (CDG) at the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA). The CCSG program focuses on integrated e-governance and digital delivery of municipal services. A key enabler to achieve this goal is creation of standards that enable diverse stakeholders to collaborate and their corresponding systems to interoperate seamlessly. This demands evolution of the necessary standards e.g. specifications, certifications and best practices in the contexts of people (for example, policy standards and working methodologies), processes (for example process standards and compliance certificates) and the underlying digital platforms (for example, Taxonomies, APIs and reference applications).
As part of the CCSG Program, CDG is constituting Working Groups for specific domains/services/modules for formulation of standards. The Working Groups for each domain will be responsible for designing the draft standards (Knowledge and process standards and Technology Standards). The standards will be developed in a collaborative and consensus-driven approach, in synchronisation with the NUIS guiding principles of ecosystem-driven approach, interoperability, minimalism, unbundling, evolvable, federated architecture, and extensibility. This will expedite the creation of a new, localised and contextually appropriate local solution as per the needs of ULBs and States.
The proposed Domain Working Groups are synchronous with the initial set of e-governance services recommended as a part of the reference applications of the National Urban Governance Platform. These are -
Out of these, the standard formulation for Property Tax is already under progress. Over time, new domain working groups would be formed based on the needs of the ecosystem, recommendations from existing domain working groups and the technical review committee.
As a part of this initiative, CDG is inviting participation from experts, practitioners and professionals (from civil society, industry, academia, city administrators) working in urban governance to contribute to this fundamental building block of urban digital transformation. Please write to us at ccsg@niua.org expressing your interest in this endeavour.