Green City tag for New Town

• New Town has received a gold certification from the Indian Green Building Council (IGBC), making it India’s first satellite city to receive the honour.
• The IGBC is a part of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). Formed in 2001, it rates buildings, schools, healthcare centres, cities etc on their eco-friendly quotient and New Town’s award.
• In 2016, the state government had pulled New Town out of the central government’s Smart City programme and instead proposed to build a Green City out of it, with focus on sustainability.

New Town, Kolkata

• New Town, is a fast-growing planned satellite city and a neighbourhood of Kolkata (earlier, Calcutta), located partly in North 24 Parganas district and South 24 Parganas district of the Indian state of West Bengal.
• This new information technology and residential hub is being developed on the north-eastern fringes of Kolkata. It consists of areas of two erstwhile villages Rajarhat and Bhangar, which is now a statutory planned development area. The area mainly consisted of huge acres of cultivable lands and water bodies, which have been acquired and developed in a planned manner.
• The process of investing in residential and industrial facilities and infrastructural development of the area has mainly started under the leadership of the then Chief Minister of West Bengal Jyoti Basu in the late 1990s.
• The master plan envisions a township which is at least three times bigger than the neighbouring planned Salt Lake City.
• The New Town (Rajarhat) has been also declared as a Solar City by the previous UPA government at the Centre and now the initiatives are being taken to declare this city as Smart Green City, a dream project of Narendra Modi (Prime Minister of India) with the help of Government of West Bengal according to a proposal submitted by Mamata Banerjee (Chief Minister of West Bengal).

By: Ziyaur Rahman