Smart City: People raise questions over NDMC selection

Civil society members have raised questions over selection of the New Delhi Municipal Council, which accounts for only three per cent of area and population of the national capital, for the Smart City project claiming that the actual process differed from the prescribed procedure.

Making the cut after a rigorous competition, the NDMC area is among the 20 cities announced as winners of the Central government’s Smart City Challenge in January.

The Delhi Housing Rights Task Force, a collective of individuals and organisations working to protect and promote the right to adequate housing, has raised concerns over non-availability of any information of other proposals received from Delhi.

The national capital has five municipal bodies — Municipal Corporations of North, South and East Delhi; the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) and the Delhi Cantonment Board. “No other proposal seems to have been considered from Delhi which represents a significant lost opportunity to seek the Central support in areas that reflect pressing needs of city. No other information exists in the public domain about why no other proposals were developed,” said Shivani Chaudhry, a member of the task force.

Another member, Gautam, claimed, “There was no adequate consultation as it was laid out in the prescribed guidelines of the Smart Cities mission. The submitted proposal by the NDMC is still not available in public domain.”

“While claims have been made of consultative meetings in different areas including JJ clusters and informal settlements, but we visited over 30 informal settlements and could not find a single locality where such a consultation has taken place,” he alleged.

Refusing to comment on the task force’s concerns, NDMC officials maintained that all due procedures had been followed as laid out in the Smart City project’s requirements.

“Given that the NDMC is one of the richest municipalities in Delhi and given that other areas in Delhi face serious problems of poverty, housing shortage, inadequate living conditions and absence of basic services, both the NDMC and the Centre need to explain this selection over other parts of Delhi,” Gautam said.

The 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 `500 crore for various projects.

The civic-body will get funding of `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 `400 crore for various projects under Smart City in its budget for the year 2016-17.

The selected proposal cited that the projects to be undertaken by the NDMC have been divided into two broad categories — 29 area-based projects and nine 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, wi-fi access points, air-quality sensors and noise-pollution sensors.