On 19 January 2018, Housing & Urban Affairs Minister Shri Hardeep S Puriannounced 9 new Smart Cities: Silvassa, Erode, Diu, Bihar-Sharif, Bareilly, Itanagar, Moradabad, Saharanpur, and Kavaratti. Now there are 99 cities in the Smart Cities Mission.

The 9 selected cities have proposed an investment of Rs. 13,000 crore, of which Rs. 11,000 crore would be in Area Based Development (ABD) initiatives and Rs. 2,000 crore in Pan City initiatives, impacting 35.3 lakh people. The total proposed investment in 99 Smart Cities now stands at Rs. 2,04,000 crore.For more details, log on to Smartcities.gov.in

TIP OF THE WEEK

A quick way to improve the quality of public spaces, particularly with large structures such as blank walls, water tanks is through public art. One example shown here is wall painting competition organised by Faridabad Smart City. For details please visit: https://goo.gl/aWbHii

Smart Cities Mission encourages the cities to leverage funds from private investments. In the first 60 cities selected, there are 278 projects worth Rs. 24,408 crore proposed to be developed with PPP. Ofthese projects, 22 projects worth Rs. 423 crore have been completed and work has started on 51 more projects worth Rs. 4,792 crore. 31 projects worth Rs. 2,830 crore have issued tenders.

19 of the 20 Round 1 cities are implementing projects with PPP. Contribution of PPP is more than 25% of total project cost under implementation.

Some of the successful projects in PPP in the Mission are common payment cards at Bhubaneshwar and Kochi; Smart Street Light at Surat , Thane and Chandigarh; Public Bike Sharing at Bhopal, Pune, Jaipur and Jabalpur; Affordable Housing at Surat and Ahmedabad; Solar Rooftop projects at NDMC and Bhubaneshwar.

Is your city capitalising on the PPP opportunity? Please contact the mission directorate for more help.

Pandesra industrial units in Surat were facing acute water shortage. To ease the situation, augmentation of Bamroli Sewage Treatment Plant was planned under Smart Cities Mission. The plan aims at tertiary sewage treatment of 40 million liters per day (MLD) to generate Industrial Grade Water for supply to Pandesara Industrial Estate.

The project will be completed in 2019. It will reduce cost of industrial water supply by 14% and generate additional revenue of Rs. 75 crore for Surat Municipal Corporation.For more details please visit: https://goo.gl/6YcYmT

Some of you might know, all 'completed' and 'work-started' projects need to be geo-tagged. Geo-tagging is the process of adding latitude and longitude to various representation-forms such as a photos and videos. We have already begun with Round 1 cities - have written to them and called to explain the process. If you are having any difficulty please contact Ms. Aparajita Ghatak as soon as possible on +91 9968025847 or email at aghatak@niua.org.