Bloomberg Philanthropies to launch website on Smart City

NEW DELHI: Bloomberg Philanthropies will design and launch a website to involve citizens, urban local bodies and other concerned for the ' Smart City' project.

Representatives of Bloomberg Philanthropies today discussed with senior officials of the Urban Development Ministry the broad contours of 'Smart City Challenge Competition' meant for assessing the preparedness and ability of smart city aspirants to undertake necessary actions, according to a senior official.

The competition is to be held soon after the Smart City scheme is accorded necessary approval, the UD Ministry official said.

The research team of Bloomberg Philanthropies conducted an ethnographic survey by interviewing citizens, urban experts, planners, and municipal officials in the cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Ranchi, Bengaluru and Mangalore about their perceptions and expectations from the central government's initiative of building 100 smart cities for designing the city challenge competition.

From the results of the survey, Bloomberg Philanthropies suggested that since the assessment of smart cities aspirant is an important component of the scheme, the competition needs to be properly branded and effectively communicated so as to generate proposals from urban local bodies based on wider citizen participation. The Bloomberg Team said that branding of the competition should aim at 'inspiring pride, creating coherence and generating action through strong citizen engagement'.

Bloomberg Philanthropies will design and launch a website to realise these objectives in consultation with the Ministry of Urban Development.

The survey conducted by Bloomberg Philanthropies resulted in eight key guiding principles - a simple application process, harnessing the power of citizens, building partnerships among all stakeholders, celebrating the Indian City in the context of enthusiasm over smart cities with a distinct Indian version of the same, demonstrating action instead of business as usual approach, balancing inspiration with pragmatism, elevating municipal officials for success and going beyond ordinary through right vision and ideas.

These results will be factored in while designing the City Challenge Competition.

The initiative of building smart cities was discussed by former Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his recent visit to India .

Bloomberg Philanthropies, involved in conducting such city challenge competitions in various countries has volunteered to do so for India too.