Smart 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 or land management and many other areas
which are equally important are specialised areas and will require specialist
human resource at various levels from planning to execution. Some of them may be
already competent and may only require re-skilling to align to new
technologies, while others will require competency building and skill
development. A detailed competency mapping is required.
There are no specific NSQF aligned qualifications
yet on most of the areas defining and measuring the liveability standards of
cities. Some stop gap measures / incremental improvements have been suggested
under the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) which may fall short. This is
once in a life time opportunity to improve the standards of living of our
existing cities and many other cities / towns which will come up due to rapid
urbanisation.
A recent report which analysed the air
pollution data of 540 major cities from 182 countries around the world to
produce the 2020 ranking of the 25 most polluted cities in the world had 07
cities from India. Incidentally, a few of these are the selected smart cities. Another
report mentions 22 out of top 30 World’s most polluted cities are in India. Such reports
certainly do not make any Indian proud.
It is time for the elite Skill Universities to
think out of the box and move away from the conventional skills which are part
of their current portfolio and help in making the smart cities mission
successful and assist in making as many cities liveable as possible.
Amongst other things, it will also address the
employment / employability indicator of liveable standards in cities.
It is time to pause, think and act.
I think the people who can plan and To
ReplyDeleteTo execute this project/MSN should be those who have understood the problem at length , breadth and depth of the problems the citizens are facing.
Who could be better qualified persons
than those who have planned and executed small and medium size similar projects in India and abroad .
Such persons could be from pvt or
Public Sector . Age should not be the criteria for such skills eg E Sreedharan
The Metroman.
Maha Singh Sector 23 Gurgaon.
It has been well analysed and very thoughtfully written. When we talk of Delhi as a major city, only a small segment of the city is partly developed, many problems have yet to be dealt with and needs changes to bring the City to compete at International level. Rest of the Delhi is like a mega slum! Most of the citizens as well as officials working in the Government up to the level of the lowest rank that is a part of Authority, seems disinterested in working with responsibility. It shows up in one look the state of cleanliness in the City which stays unclean, despite attempts to clean it up. It indicates complete failure of the system. Then there are cities like Indore, which is rated to be the cleanest city in the country. The work culture there is amazing and every citizen seems involved in keeping it clean!!!
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