Cidco making south Navi Mumbai ‘smart’

The Cidco (City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra Limited) has started working towards making Navi Mumbai a smart city. However, their project is not part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of 100 smart cities in India. The corporation took the initiative to go ahead individually after chief minister Devendra Fadnavis suggested the same.

Cidco has started working in south Navi Mumbai, including Panvel, Kharghar, Ulwe, Dronagiri, Kalamboli, Kamothe and Pushpak Node. Cidco officials said work on all projects would be completed by 2018.

VC and MD of Cidco, Sanjay Bhatia, said, “After the PM announced the smart cities project, we thought of participating and approached the CM. However, he suggested that if we are able to generate money as an individual body, we should create our own smart city. After that meeting, we started our work and now we have hundreds of plans. On December 4, we will reveal details about our projects.”

In the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Cidco had been assigned to develop 14 nodes under the title of Navi Mumbai. Cidco has already developed Navi Mumbai north with its own funds and handed over to the civic body. “Now we are concentrating on the remaining seven towns of south Navi Mumbai,” said Mr Bhatia. “In this area, there are a large number of economic drivers coming up like Navi Mumbai International Airport and expansion of JNPT. Also, Metro work has started and projects of Metro 2 and 3 will soon come up. There’s affordable housing, expansion of national highways, port cities and a green field smart city project at “Pushpak Nagar”. Total public investment on infrastructure in the next five years is thus going to exceed `50,000 crore, leading to creation of about 8.7 lakh job opportunities. The whole project will cost more than `32,7444.40 crore,” he added.

An official said, “There are some interesting projects that we will be starting. For instance, Auto DCR for the entire area where builders will get permission online for their projects by showing proper videos of their projects to officials. Also, grey water pipeline project where two water lines will be supplied to every plot owner to save water.”