Smart Cities Mission: An Opportunity for Skills Development
S mart Cities is a wonderful mission. To make it sustainable, it has been argued to extend the project to make cities liveable, which makes sense. One look at the websites of the 100 selected Smart Cities shows a lot of work is in progress, some bit executed, appears more for visibility with low impact, easy to execute projects, however, more serious work is in planning / tendering phase. The question that arises is who will plan and execute these smart / liveable city projects? Will the dependence continue on the expertise of existing people who have been responsible for messing up the city planning!! There are 79 indicators (57 core and 22 supporting) listed by the Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India as “Liveability Standards in Cities” to generate the liveability index and rate cities. The list is very comprehensive. Each of these indicators, whether it is water management or pollution control or transport / traffic management, toilets, or energy, or crime control...