ROURKELA: With a day left for participation in the ‘City Challenge’ round competition of Smart City scheme, Rourkela City administration is working overtime to ensure maximum public participation to find a place in the list of first 20 of 98 Smart Cities.
A flurry of activities is underway with sending of innovative ideas for city development and smart solutions to problems ending on Monday.
Official sources said in the offline route, more than 55,000 feedback forms have been collected towards solutions for area-based problems and pan-city problems. The online route has also picked up steam, although the city is handicapped by low Internet penetration of its majority population.
Till Sunday evening, city vision statement category received 162 entries through the online mode, while it was about 2,000 in offline.
About 2,000 online entries were received for area-based solution.
In general discussion category, more than 8,000 online entries were received with hope of adding another 4,000 in the next 24 hours.
Yet, in matter of liking Facebook page for Rourkela Smart City, the city lags behind with only 5,000 likes.
Volunteers of Rourkela Youth Forum (RYF) and Rourkela Tips over the past three days have been tirelessly reaching out to people devoid of Internet access and facilitating online entries with surprising outcome.
RYF president Binay Singh said the pace of online entries is slowing down due to frequent server failure of the government portal.
Rourkela ADM and Rourkela Municipal Corporation (RMC) administrator K Sudershan Chakravorty said, “They are quite optimistic of Rourkela finding a place in the first 20 list.”
As the last stage of competition, Smart City Walk would be organised on December 5 and finishing touches given to Smart City Proposal (SCP) and a vision document for submission by December 15. He said in the ongoing competition, not numbers, but percentage of public participation, would be counted.