SPIRITTo improve the quality of life and attract people and investments to the City, and to set in motion a virtuous cycle of growth and development, MoHUA launched the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) on 25 June, 2015. The objective of the mission is to promote sustainable and inclusive cities that provide core infrastructure and give a decent quality of life to their citizens through application of ‘smart’ solutions. The magnitude of challenges facing Indian cities, coupled with their complexity and diversity make it immensely important to foster innovation in products, services, infrastructure and processes to create community-centric, cost-effective and sustainable solutions. To meet these objectives, it is important to build the right partnerships and networks, create enabling environments for stakeholder engagement, and put in place an ecosystem which breeds innovation. Government as producer of services and communities as consumers is the business-as-usual way of thinking about governance. What is required today is governance in the quadruple-helix framework wherein communities and Governments co-create solutions with partnership of Industry and academia. Together they comprise the innovation eco-system. Harnessing of strengths of Indian innovation ecosystem would lead to promoting and nurturing such innovations under the SCM.
In the above background, a collaboration between the Smart Cities Mission (MoHUA), Atal Innovation Mission and Startup India scheme under Invest India would enable harnessing the strengths of these programs. This will foster creation of an eco-system for innovations in Smart Cities, enabling local area development and harnessing technology and providing a boost to the economy. Such a collaboration would be mutually beneficial in realizing the objectives of all the three Government initiatives. This partnership would be referred to as SPIRIT, which is the “Smart cities Promoting Innovation Research and Incubation in Technology”.
Your feedback and suggestions over draft concept paper would be invaluable for us. We request you to provide your feedback/ suggestions/ recommendations on this concept paper, here, by 15th Jan, 2019.