Cities for City Slickers

Context: A 2010 McKinsey report estimates that by 2030, 40% of India’s population (590 million Indians) is expected to live in cities.

Challenges Pertaining to the Growing Urban Population:

• India has to build 700-900 million sq m of urban space every year until 2030, to sustain the growth. Implying that 70% of the India of the future is yet to be built.
• Opportunity to transform cities into robust economic behemoths, comes with the challenge of improving living conditions of millions

Government Steps:

• Incentivising issuance of Municipal bonds by Urban Local Bodies (ULBs): to raise financial resources.
  • It will help improve financial and municipal governance, orient cities towards self-sufficiency, and provide the necessary support for developing civic infrastructure.
• Credit rating of mission cities: to help ULBs of mission cities to raise funds for financing different urban improvement projects.
  • Credit rating work for 485 Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) cities has been commissioned.
  • 163 cities have received an Investible Grade Rating (IGR), with 36 cities across 12 states and UTs getting an A– or above.
• Online Building Permission System: operational in 2,057 cities to facilitate Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) in construction permits through paperless approvals and building permissions.
  • The Urban Learning Internship Programme (TULIP) and Smart Cities Innovation Challenge have been introduced, to further the build capacity.
  • India’s EoDB rank in construction permits has jumped from 185 in 2017 to 27 in 2020.
• Integrated Command and Control Centres built under the Smart Cities Mission: used as crisis management rooms during Covid-19 in 47 cities.
  • Model of how technological solutions like GIS (geographic information system) mapping and telemedicine services can be used to tackle such future public health emergencies.
• Covid-19 has brought the importance of civic cleanliness and hygiene to the fore, the Swachh Bharat Mission helping people make programmatic interventions and maintain citizen-led networks. 

Conclusion: Maturing of programmatic interventions will help in improving the necessary civic infrastructure, build local expertise, and provide new avenues from public-private cooperation.