Times of India: Ahmedabad: Tuesday, 26 May 2015.
In April this year, the Union cabinet cleared
Smart City projects worth Rs 1 lakh crore for developing 100 cities in the country. The plans were first announced in the July 2014 Budget of the new Union government. However, if you had recently filed an
RTI application with the Smart City division of the Union urban development
department to know the list of proposed smart cities in Gujarat and the
country, and the allocations made for them, the answer would be: No such
information is available as the guidelines of the scheme is at present under
formulation.'
This is the RTI reply, signed by M K Garg,
director, Smart City division, that a resident of New Ranip, Rohan Shah,
received on May 12 from the Union urban development department. In fact, the reply even
refused to acknowledge that the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City is the
country's first smart city!
Seven cities of Gujarat Ahmedabad, Surat,
Vadodara, Rajkot, Bhavnagar, Junagadh and Gandhinagar were included in the list
of 100 smart cities to be developed under the central government's Smart City
mission. Gujarat, along with Kerala, Rajasthan and Karnataka, are supposed to
have the highest number of smart cities in the country.
"It is strange that for the past many months, a concept paper for 100 smart cities was being circulated. But when the same Smart City department
was asked for a copy, it denied such a list existed," said Roshan, who had
filed the RTI for information on the allocations made for Gujarat smart cities
by the central government.