Hyderabad: The Telangana government has found huge flaws in the selection of ‘Smart Cities’ by the Centre and asked the Union urban development minister M. Venkaiah Naidu to halt the ongoing ‘Smart City’ challenge till the overall distribution formula is reviewed.
Calling the Centre’s decision to take notified statutory towns by states as one of the parameters for declaring smart cities as ‘absurd’, TRS deputy floor leader in Lok Sabha B. Vinod Kumar said Telangana was losing significantly due to this parameter and it was unacceptable.
He urged the Centre to revoke the statutory town criteria in the distribution formula of the smart city mission statement and guidelines. “Allocation of smart city towns and Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation budgetary provisions should be based on urban population in each state. Considering statutory towns as another parameter with equal weightage appears absurd because the number of statutory towns is declared by the individual state governments independently as per their whims and fancies,” he wrote to Mr Venkaiah Naidu.
Mr Kumar further said that uncontested prize will go to Tamil Nadu which has a mindboggling 721 statutory towns, some with hamlets having a meagre 2,000 population and they have got 12 smart cities. He also cited similar instances in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.
The Smart Cities mission is a Central scheme. It is therefore reasonable to expect that the norms and criteria would be such that they would give all states a level playing field, he said.
The TRS MP said Telangana with an urban population of 1.36 crore has only 42 towns with a minimum of 30,000 population where as Andhra Pradesh with 1.47 crore urban population has 83 towns while Rajasthan with 1.70 crore population has 185 towns.
