Context: Uttar Pradesh was ranked the best State and Indore and Surat were jointly named the best cities by the Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry for their work under the Smart Cities Mission.

About the Smart Cities Mission

• National Smart Cities Mission is an urban renewal and retrofitting program by the Government of India with the mission to develop smart cities across the country, making them citizen friendly and sustainable.
• The Union Ministry of Urban Development is responsible for implementing the mission in collaboration with the state governments of the respective cities.
• While the mission initially included only 100 cities, the government later announced to expand the mission to all 4,000 cities in India.
• Smart Cities Mission is supporting interested cities in raising finance through Municipal Bonds.
• The Urban Learning Internship Program (TULIP) is designed for all ULBs (Urban Local Bodies) and Smart City SPVs (Special Purpose Vehicles) to engage fresh graduates as interns.

Climate Smart Cities and Data Smart Cities are two important programs under Smart Cities Mission.

• The use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is at the core of enhancing the city’s liveability, workability, and sustainability.
• The Ministry of Urban Development has identified 24 key areas that cities must address in their ‘smart cities’ plan.
• Of these 24 key areas, 3 are directly related to water and 7 are indirectly related to water – Smart-metre management, leakage identification, preventive maintenance, and water quality modeling.
• Smart Cities Mission is one of the mechanisms that will help operationalize the nationwide implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) priorities like poverty alleviation, employment, and other basic services.

Definition of “Smart Cities” according to Smart Cities Mission

• Some definitional boundaries are required to guide cities in the Mission.
• In the imagination of any city dweller in India, the picture of a smart city contains a wish list of infrastructure and services that describes his or her level of aspiration.
• To provide for the aspirations and needs of the citizens, urban planners ideally aim at developing the entire urban eco-system, which is represented by the four pillars of comprehensive development-institutional, physical, social and economic infrastructure.
• This can be a long-term goal and cities can work towards developing such comprehensive infrastructure incrementally, adding on layers of ‘smartness’.

About the Progress in Smart Cities

• At a virtual event to mark the sixth anniversary of the launch of the Smart Cities Mission, the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) and the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-Urban (PMAY-U), the Ministry announced that Uttar Pradesh had been ranked one, Madhya Pradesh was second and Tamil Nadu third in the India Smart Cities Awards 2020.
• The Ministry said in a statement that 22% in terms of the total value of the projects proposed and 52% in terms of the total number of projects proposed by the 100 Smart Cities had been completed so far.
• Under the PMAY-U, the Ministry said 1.12 crore houses had been sanctioned, of which 50 lakh had been completed.