As the Smart City programme moves on to become a national project, India’s leading thinkers on the subject will gather today to figure out the opportunities and the lessons needed to make it come alive.
Amitabh Kant, secretary, department of industrial development, noted that the economy was the cusp of urbanisation development. “So it is imperative that we focus on innovative and sustainable solutions which will necessarily have to be integrated with the Smart City project,” he said.
Echoing his line of thought, Onno Ruhl, country director, World Bank, said, “What better way to define India’s smart cities than to start with he aspirations of their citizens? Go to into any Indian town and ask any girl in class eight what she aspires to be when she grows up. Smart Cities in India should aim to enable that aspiration.”
Both Kant and Ruhl will be speaking at the event about these strands of thought and more, which will also feature NITI Aayog member Bibek Debroy, secretary, department of information technology, Ram Sewak Sharma along with Piyush Somani, MD and CEO, ESDS Software Solutions.
The event is the launch platform of the Digital India Dialogue of the Indian Express Group organised with NewsX. The motivation behind the Digital India Dialogue is to encourage a frank exchange of thoughts between the political leadership, bureaucracy, chiefs of key academic institutions and corporates on each of the nine components of the government’s pet project: Digital India.
The Smart City project is expected to be one of the key deliverables being planned for this year by the NDA government. So it is only fitting that chief guest Venkaiah Naidu, minister for urban development and parliamentary affairs, will set the various elements of the agenda rolling for the evening.
Along with Kant and Ruhl, Debroy and Sharma will be expected to speak about the key components of what holds this 21stcentury equivalent of a national plan that will connect most sectors of the economy. For instance, Debroy has already moved on some of them in his capacity as the chairman of the railway modernisation committee that through its critical inputs for the Railway Budget this year has already provided the blueprint of a transport network to make such cities take off.
Similarly, under Sharma, the department of information technology is sorting through the gargantuan possibilities to choose the right menu that will hold these cities operating with the maximum capacity through this century and beyond.
Listening to this power-packed panel will be the who’s who of India’s policymakers, industry leaders and members from the top academic institutions who are each keen to believe that cities can and ought to be engines of growth, but for that they need a re-engineering of governance, of finance and of planning, all aided by bringing in the latest available technology.