Centre seeks public investment in building smart cities

 The Dollar Business Bureau

The Union Minister of Urban Development, Venkaiah Naidu on Friday laid stress over Public-Private-People Partnership (4P) and Smart Leadership, Smart Governance, Smart Technologies and Smart People (4S), as key processes towards successful urban management and achievement of Smart Cities initiative. Addressing the ‘Consultation Workshop with States and Stakeholders’ being organized by his Ministry, Naidu said building smart cities is all about 4S and 4P. Stating that the Public-Private-People Partnership is the best destination in meeting the resource challenges, Naidu called the people to become partners in the city development by willing to pay for the value addition to the services and enforce accountability. Attracting investments, adoption of technology platforms to reduce human-human interface, ensuring online delivery of services and information besides promoting direct participation of citizens in decision making and execution, will all together contribute the success of smart governance, said Naidu. Naidu also called the States and the urban local bodies to play a key role in building smart cities, while the Central Government could do the hand-holding as an enabler besides providing some financial assistance. The States and urban local bodies have come out with required policy and procedural innovations for attracting investments, the Minister added. Here it is noteworthy to mention that the Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley also had called for the public-private partnership to boost the Indian infrastructure sector. “There will be public spending and private spending that will be encouraged. Of course, the infrastructure financing from international sources is also important, because that is the investment where capital is available at much cheaper rates and we will encourage people to do that. That is what we are doing here at Davos too,” Jaitley had said, while speaking to press on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum at Davos, adding that the target is to reduce the fiscal deficit below 3% over the next few years. With a stressing upon sanitation saying that the inadequate sanitation is costing about $ 54 billion i.e. 6.40% of GDP each year, besides resulting in 18 lakh deaths each year due to diarrheal diseases, the Minister noted that the ‘Swachh Bharat’ stamp released on Friday would help in this regard.  

This article was published on January 31, 2015.