‘Cities Digest Poverty’: PM Modi Launches 82 Smart City Projects

He termed the Smart City Mission as not just a concept or allocation of funds, but as a public-based movement.

Narendra Modi speaking at the Smart City event. (Photo: Twitter @ANI_news)

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday urged city planners not to treat urbanisation as a “calamity” but as an “opportunity” to enrich and improve the lives of the people in an all-inclusive manner.

He inaugurated 84 varied Smart City Projects for 20 cities and said the opportunity should be grabbed to plan ahead for the future.

Cities have the strength to ‘digest’ poverty and provide economic opportunities for the poorest coming from other less-developed areas. We must further strengthen the cities to increase this ‘digestive’ ability, make it faster and wider... economic prosperity will automatically follow.

Narendra Modi

Terming the Smart City Mission as not just a concept or allocation of funds, but a public-based movement, Modi said that the experiment has worked successfully.

We received over 2.5 million workable ideas from the people which the government will have to take note of. This resulted in a participatory approach in development and will lead to a huge transformation in future.

Dismissing apprehensions about Smart Cities, Modi said it entails providing sufficient water, electricity, cleanliness, traffic management, decent housing for all, solid and liquid waste management, emergency services, coupled with technology to make life easy and comfortable for all.

The 20 selected Smart Cities were linked to the Pune venue through videoconferencing wherein their states’ Chief Ministers and other leaders gave details of their plans for the Smart Cities in their states and interacted with the PM.