UP, TN, Maharashtra to get most number of smart cities

NEW DELHI: A dozen states including the eight ruled by BJP and its allies will have bigger responsibility to make the two flagship schemes of Modi government – Smart Cities and AMRUT – successful by the next general election as these will account for 70% of smart cities to be developed and AMRUT cities and towns to be rejuvenated.
These states are Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, Telangana and Chattisgarh.TOI on May 2 had first reported how UP will get the maximum number of smart cities followed by Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra.
Sources said the eight states under the BJP rule or its allies account for about half of smart cities to be developed and 225 of 476 AMRUT cities identified so far. Five UTs are also the responsibility of central government led by BJP. “So, these states have to excel in a big way, else they would share the blame, if the programmes don’t achieve desired results,” said a government official.
Modi will launch the two programmes besides the ‘Housing for All’ scheme on Thursday.
Officials said that geographical equity has been taken into consideration to ensure that each state/ UT gets to develop at least one smart city. “Each state has been assigned a certain number of cities they can nominate which will participate in the second stage of ‘inter-city’ competition among all 100 such cities. From this, top 20 will be chosen for funding during this fiscal. Post this, 40 cities will be selected for financing in 2016-17 and the remaining 40 in the next year,” a source said.
Each state is assigned a specific number of cities for such nomination by the urban development ministry based on an objective criteria giving equal weightage (50:50) to urban population in each state and the number of statutory cities/ towns in each state.
For AMRUT scheme, all cities and towns with population of above one lakh will be included in the list. Hill cities, island cities, towns of tourism importance and towns along Ganga will be included even though they have less than one lakh population. So far, 476 cities/towns have been selected as per details given in the above table and the rest are being finalized.