Industry stakeholders hail smart cities initiative

Hailing the smart cities projects and two others that were launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday, industry stakeholders said they will generate a lot of employment opportunities in the country.

"Once these initiatives are actually implemented they will also have an economic multiplier effect on the nation's economy as a whole, since such huge infrastructure development initiatives will require a massive increase in production and manufacturing output of the country," Amit Modi, vice president, Confederation of Real Estate Developers Association of India (CREDAI) western Uttar Pradesh said.

CREDAI is a consortium of organizations throughout India designed to further the cause of orderly real estate development.

"Huge employment opportunities will be created in not just in the infrastructure sector, but also in manufacturing sector, due to all the anclliary industries connected the ecosystem like steel, cement, wood, rubber metal even riber optics etc," Modi added.

Smart cities will be selected through a bottom-up rather than top-down approach, where the decision would be made by the citizens and municipalities concerned, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Thursday.

"For the first time such an approach is being taken, where neither the centre nor states will decide. The decision to become a smart city will be taken by the citizens themselves, by the municipalities," Modi said launching the three missions on Smart Cities, the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation and Housing for All.

"We welcome the ambitious and audacious goal declared by the government today (Thursday), of setting up 100 smart cities, rejuvenation of 500 cities and Housing for all, in addition to the existing initiatives of HRIDAY (Heritage Cities)," Jaijit Bhattacharya, partner, infrastructure and government services, KPMG in India said.

"Critical urban infrastructure is urgently required in order to make the economy efficient. The process of building this urban infrastructure would lead to an explosive growth in the economy as the execution of the vision would entail large scale consumption of cement, metals, plastics, materials and services. It would also lead to innovations and creation of spin-off technologies that would surely make India a global player in building future cities," he added.