THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The capital city has improved its ranking to 46 from 90 in the Central government’s Smart City Mission. “It is the concerted effort of Smart City Thiruvananthapuram Limited (SCTL), the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), in tendering out and issuing work orders for the projects in 2020 that led to this huge jump,” said SCTL CEO P Bala Kiran.
Smart City Mission was rolled out for 100 cities by the Centre in June 2015. Twenty cities were selected in the first round in January 2016, followed by 40 in September 2016. Thiruvananthapuram was among the 30 cities selected in the third round in June 2017.
“SCTL competed with cities that had a head start of 2.5 years. However, the late entry has not affected any of the projects and work is moving as per schedule. SCTL has so far tendered out projects worth Rs 1,082.21 crore and issued work orders worth Rs 1,035.8 crore out of the Rs 1,135-crore grant it received from the Centre, state and city corporation,” he said.
The cities’ performance is constantly monitored by the Smart City Mission using a ranking system which calculates the percentile of the number of projects tendered, awarded and completed. “This success has been achieved by the complete and proactive support of the LSGD minister, chief secretary, mayor, principal secretary of LSGD, and the team effort of SCTL and IPE Global, a project management consultancy. The SPV worked on a war footing in 2020,” said Bala Kiran.
SCTL is ahead of first-round cities Delhi, Jabalpur, Bhuvaneshwar, second-round cities Warangal, Raipur, Panaji, Faridabad, Amritsar, Chandigarh, Dharamshala and third-round cities Bengaluru, Shimla, Puducherry, Srinagar and Jammu.