Smart Cities Mission: An Opportunity for Skills Development

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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.

 


Location: India

Comments

  1. Lt Col Maha Singh (Veteran)24 April 2021 at 20:02

    I think the people who can plan and To
    To 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.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown25 April 2021 at 09:33

    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!!!

    ReplyDelete

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