NEW DELHI: Durga Shanker Mishra, secretary, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs said that their target is to develop our 4,372 cities, along with other cities, as smart cities. He was speaking at fourth Smart Cities Summit organized by FICCI.
“The smart cities concept does not have a single dimension of focusing on just big or small cities; any city can become a smart city. To make this happen, cities should use their land, resources, local people, and skills to move on different path,” he said.
“Every city will have their own path of smartness. Employability, sustainability and liveability are the core things on which the cities move. The learning of one city chosen under 100 smart cities be spread to other cities so that it becomes a light house,” he added.
“As growing number of cities have begun their urban transformation, there is an emerging trend of using human-centric and cloud-based technologies to automate and integrate urban services. Such technologies are resulting in significant data generation that can be further used to effective urban development,” said Tanmoy Chakrabarty, chairman, FICCI Urban Transformation Committee.
Mishra stated that smart cities have played a very important role in dealing with the COVID-induced crisis. Many of the smart cities effectively used their Integrated Command and Control Centres (ICCC) for city’s operations management as covid-19 war rooms for analysing city-specific data, coordinating activities of various state, city agencies and connecting with citizens.
“There were 49 working Integrated Command and Control Centres, which has now increased to 53 and 30 more will be added in the forthcoming months. It is not only the technology but how technology is impacting the livelihood of citizens which is important,” said Mishra.
