As the June 2023 deadline of the Smart Cities Mission, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, approaches, a senior official of Federal Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry on Sunday said that 22 of the smart cities will be ready by April.
Work in the remaining 78 cities will be completed in the next three or four months.
The 22 cities which will be ready by next month are Bhopal, Indore, Agra, Varanasi, Bhubaneswar, Chennai, Coimbatore, Erode, Ranchi, Salem, Surat, Udaipur, Visakhapatnam, Ahmedabad, Kakinada, Pune, Vellore, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Madurai, Amaravati, Tiruchirappalli and Thanjavur.
While talking to an Indian news agency, the official said that the projects in these 22 cities are in the final stages and in the next three or four months work in the remaining cities will be completed.
Special-purpose vehicles (SPVs) are implementing the mission at the city level. These SPVs plan, implement, operate, monitor and evaluate their Smart City projects.
Earlier on 6 February, Federal Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs Kaushal Kishore informed the Rajya Sabha (Upper House of the Parliament) that out of 7,804 projects in the 100 smart cities 5,246 projects have been completed.
The flagship program of Prime Minister Narendra Modi started on 25 June 2015 aims to provide citizens a better quality of life and a clean and sustainable environment.