NDMC Area To Get Rs 500 cr Funding For Smart City Initiative

NEW DELHI, January 28: The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) area, which is home to the high and mighty in the country, has been selected among the 20 cities of the Union Urban Development Ministry's Smart City initiative, enabling it to receive a funding of Rs 500 crore for various projects. Making its cut through a rigorous competition, NDMC area is among the 20 cities which were announced winners of the Smart City Challenge. However, NDMC consists of only 3 per cent of the area and population of the national capital. The civic-body will get a funding of Rs 200 crore in the first year for implementation of the project and the remaining funds will be released in subsequent four years. Besides, it had allocated over Rs 400 crore for various projects under Smart City in its budget for 2016-17. "The major areas that we had proposed to develop in NDMC areas include smart bus stops, app-integrated cycle tracks, sensor-based smart parking, e-surveillance including e-challan for traffic violation, automatic sewer cleaning machines, geo-tagging of bins and transforming public toilets into smart public amenities centre," a senior NDMC official said. The selected proposal cited that the projects to be undertaken by NDMC have been divided into two broad categories - 29 area based projects and 9 pan-city projects. One major initiative under the area-based projects will be transformation of electric poles into smart poles with LEDs having incident-driven controllers, communication infrastructure, WiFi access points, air-quality sensors and noise-pollution sensors. Other proposed projects include renovation of Gole Market, an interactive museum on the history of Indian civilisation, installation of a signature giant smart digital screen for displaying traffic updates, cricket scores and advertisements; installation of rooftop solar panels on all buildings, among others. The pan-city projects include smart grid implementation, 40 MW solar power projects, waste water management plants, e-learning solutions in all NDMC schools, centralising students' health e-records and integration of all public medical facilities through cloud-based e-healthcare system. Connaught place, the heart of the national capital, will be a major focus area under the Smart City project, including making the inner circle a vehicle-free zone. While it has bungalows of Union Ministers and parliamentarians, many top industrialists also stay in the area. Parliament House, buildings of all the ministries, Supreme Court, High Court and residences of Supreme Court judges, senior bureaucrats and senior military officers are in NDMC areas. Kochi, Ahemedabad, Jabalpur, Visakhapatnam, Solapur, Davnagore, Indore, Coimbatore, Kakinada, Belagavi, Udaipur, Guwahati, Chennai, Ludhiana and Bhopal are other cities selected in the first batch to be developed as Smart Cities. -PTI