The Smart Cities Mission (SCM), besides focussing on development, gave a new dimension to governance. The opportunities it provided would usher a new regime of budgeting public expenditure, said Chandrashekar Hariharan of Bengaluru-based Responsible Cities Foundation on Thursday.
The conservation expert, who was at the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Meenakshi Ashram at Saramthangi village near here to discuss the infusion of green concepts in utilisation of natural resources, hoped that the “brutality and unaccountability of public expenditure will go” with the implementation of SCM.
Mr. Hariharan looked at the concept of SCM as not pro-rich or pro-investment, but as pro-governance. He said the Smart City project implementation would not be based on detailed project reports or request for proposals, but “on sustainable, liveable, inclusive and viable” proposals. With many cities in Tamil Nadu competing for Smart City projects in the first round itself, Mr. Hariharan said the focus of SCM should be on food, energy, water, waste, technology, transportation, education, health, hospitality and housing. Technology, which meant database would bring about transparency in governance, create benchmarks and measure performance.
Pointing to the technology-enabled citizen interface in a Smart City, Mr. Hariharan said it would ensure quality in governance through fixing a response time to any public grievance. The SCM had come as an opportunity to enable a paradigm shift to a regime of good governance from a system of creating expenditure targets and not being accountable.
“It is a wonderful sign of our democracy that the ballot has forced the government to push an entirely new agenda and a new definition of public performance, cutting across party lines, through SCM,” he said.
Smart City proposals should be unique and reflect the character of the city, he said, exuding confidence that the SCM would transform “governments of administration into managers of a city.”
