After first Smart Cities Mission for 100 cities, the government will expand the Smart Cities Mission to all 4,000 cities in the country. The ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA), the nodal department for Smart City Mission, is set to roll out smart city 2.0 mission in 2020. The central government’s second version of the smart city initiative will be rolled out across the country, said a government official.

The ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA) is also looking at alternative funding mechanisms such as pool finance, fund of fund approach, bonds, fiscal money, monetisation of unused land and tapping foreign capital.

The mission has started rating the existing projects under five parameters - planning, technology, governance, services and finance, along with climate sensitive action and ease of living sensitive action. So far, about 10% of the planned projects have been completed in the past three years.

Under Smart City Mission, projects worth over Rs 2.05 lakh crore (~26 bn Euro) are proposed in 100 cities and a significant progress has been made in terms of implementation of these projects, the Economic Survey 2018-19 said.

The strategic components of this mission are area-based development involving city improvement (retrofitting), city renewal (redevelopment), city extension (greenfield development) and a Pan-city development in which smart solutions are applied covering larger parts of the city.

• The 100 cities under the mission have proposed to execute 5,151 projects worth 2,05,018 crore (~26 bn Euro) in five years from their respective dates of selection.
• Financial innovation is in-built in the design of the programme. The distribution of funding from the central and state government is Rs 93,552 crore (~12 bn Euro) (45%) and funds from PPP is Rs 41,022 crore (~5 bn Euro) (21%).

The government is planning to make health, education and financial data — collected from more than 4,000 urban local bodies under its Smart Cities Mission — public by 2024 and eventually monetising it, reports The Hindu. The government will start with an open data platform for 100 cities under the mission and expand it to cover data from 500 cities by 2022, the report said. By 2024, all urban centres would be covered in this platform. Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs’ (MoHUA) India Urban Data Exchange – set up for the Smart Cities project – will be expanded, and eventually become a “marketplace”, the report continues. 

The open data platform has 2,783 data catalogs from 99 Smart Cities, and by 2020, all data sets for the Smart Cities would be available, officials said.

The Centre has got into a mission rethink mode to speed up the implementation of projects under the Smart City Mission. In the fifth and final year of ‘Smart City Mission’, the Centre has set a new target - Mission Rs 2 lakh crore (~26 bn Euro). With the current trajectory of project tendering and completion, the government would have awarded contracts till 2022. However, in the last mile, the ministry of housing and urban affairs has decided to issue tenders for all projects under the mission over the next six months, that is till March 2020. The projects would be worth Rs 2 lakh crore (~26 bn Euro).

As the mission would complete five years on June 25, 2020, the Centre has set another target for its fifth anniversary celebrations - to award all works and begin work on projects worth Rs 2 lakh crore (~26 bn Euro) on the ground.