Indore, Surat bag Smart Cities award for best performance; UP best among states – Times of India

NEW DELHI: Among 100 Smart Cities, Surat and Indore have bagged the best award for their overall performance in 2020 and Uttar Pradesh won the state award. Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu finished as the first and second runner up.
In 2019, Surat was the sole winner among smart cities.
This is the first time when the housing and urban affairs ministry has given awards to states for the overall performance of the smart cities and for their proactive role. UP has got the first award for taking up the development of seven more cities on its own as smart cities. These are Meerut, Ghaziabad, Ayodhya, Ferozabad, Gorakhpur, Mathura-Vrindavan and Saharanpur.

The ministry also declared joint winners under Covid innovation category. Kalyan-Dombivali in Maharashtra and Varanasi in UP bagged the award.
The awards were announced to commemorate six years of the Smart City Mission on Friday.
According to the ministry, out of the total proposed projects under the mission, 5,924 worth Rs 1.78 lakh crore have been tendered so far and work orders have been issued for 5,236 projects costing around Rs 1.46 crore. It said 2,665 projects of Rs 45,080 crore have also been fully completed and are operational.

The ministry said 70 Smart Cities have developed and operationalised their Integrated Command and Control Centres (ICCCs), which are functioning as war-rooms for Covid management, and along with other smart infrastructure developed under the mission. These are being developed across all 100 Smart Cities.
It said so far 310 “Smart Road” projects have been completed and another 459 such projects are at tender or implementation stage.
The ministry also launched the report on Climate Smart Cities Assessment Framework (CSCAF) 2.0 to evaluate the current performance of cities across five thematic areas in which 126 cities participated. The top nine performing cities which have been awarded “4 star rating” are Surat, Indore, Ahmedabad, Pune, Vijayawada, Rajkot, Visakhapatnam, Pimpri-Chinchwad and Vadodara.