The Government of India has officially launched the LAP (Local Area Plan) and TPS (Town Plan Schemes) for 25 Smart Cities. Under these blueprints, the Union Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry will sanction Rs. 2 crore as central assistance to each city for urban expansion in a planned manner. Rs. 50 crore will be given overall for the preparation of TPS/LAP. The Central Assistance will be disbursed in three installments, namely 20% after preliminary proposal submission, 40% upon submission of draft plan and 40% upon submission of the final plan as per reports.
These 25 cities are Guwahati, Greater Visakhapatnam, Chennai, Indore, Vadodara, Varanasi, Thiruvananthapuram, Bangalore, Pune, Warangal, Jaipur, Bhubaneswar, Amritsar, Shimla, Panaji, Faridabad, Patna, New Kolkata, Ranchi, Imphal, Gangtok, Raipur, Aizawl, Dehradun and Srinagar. The TPS and LAP has been developed under the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation or AMRUT in order to facilitate better planning and infrastructure development across brownfield areas or those portions of the city which cannot take the growing pressure on current infrastructure in spite of being developed already. This will also cover greenfield areas, i.e. those peripheral zones of the city where development and overall growth may happen in a haphazard manner.
The preparation of the Town Planning Scheme and Local Area Plan should be finished within a year with the preliminary proposal and draft plan expected within 2 months and 10 months respectively. TCPO (Town and Country Planning Organizations) will be offering assistance to state agencies in this regard. Making the schemes operational will be possible with these guidelines and these will be dispatched across 25 States.
The Smart Cities Digital Payment award has also been instituted for the promotion of Digital India by the Government and to promote greater convenience for urban dwellers in the country. This award will be given to smart cities for the promotion of digital payments for their citizens along with the implementation of unique payment based initiatives as well. 100 days will be the challenge period starting from the launch and a two-stage process will decided the conferring of awards. Responses for the first stage have to be given by September 15, 2018. The final result date will be notified later on.
For smoother evaluation, the smart cities will be sub-divided into 4 categories which are population based, i.e. up to 5 lakh, 5-10 lakh, above 4 million and 1-4 million. The Smart Cities fellowship and internship program has also been launched which will offer scope to young citizens to get a feel of urban governance and planning first-hand. 30 young postgraduates, graduates and PhD holders will be engaged in areas like engineering, urban planning, IT, urban design, finance, urban mobility, environment and the social sector by the Ministry.
