25.6.15

Of Smart Cities & AMRUT....


A dozen states, including eight ruled by BJP and its allies, will have a bigger responsibility to make the two flagship schemes of Modi government -Smart Cities and AMRUT -successful by the next general election as they will account for 70% of the smart cities to be developed and cities and towns to be rejuvenated under AMRUT.
The 12 states are Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, Telangana and Chhattisgarh.
Sources said the eight states under the governments of BJP or its allies account for about half of the smart cities to be developed and 225 of 476 AMRUT cities identified so far. The Five UTs are also the responsibility of the central government led by BJP . “So, these states have to excel in a big way , else they will share the blame if the programmes don't achieve the desired results,“ said a government official. Modi will launch the two programmes along with the `Housing for All' scheme on Thursday
Officials said that geographical equity has been taken into consideration to ensure that each state/UT gets to develop at least one smart city .
“Each state has been assigned a certain number of cities they can nominate for participation in the second stage of the `inter-city' competition among all 100 such cities. From this, the top 20 will be chosen for funding during this fiscal.Post this, 40 cities will be selected for financing in 2016-17 and the remaining 40 in the next year,“ a source said.
Each state is assigned a specific number of cities for such nomination by the urban development ministry based on an objective criteria giving equal weight (50:50) to the urban population in each state and number of statutory cities towns in each state.
For the AMRUT scheme, all cities and towns with a population of above one lakh will be included in the list. Hill cities, island cities, towns of tourist importance and towns along the Ganga will be included even though they have a population of less than 1 lakh.




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