The Corporation of the City of Panaji (CCP) and the Goa State Infrastructure Development Corporation (GSIDC) have again begun the process to draft a new proposal for the Smart City funding, in the hope that Panjim will make it to the list of cities in the fast-track competition. The consultant ICLEI Asia is again involved in drafting the proposal. CCP, GSIDC and ICLEI Asia have this time undertaken the exercise of studying the proposals of the 20 cities that were selected in the first round so that they can structure the new proposal accordingly.
When Goa lost out in the first round there was the feeling that Goa’s proposal was not good enough and that other cities had stolen a march over Panjim. But later the Union Minister of State for Urban Development, in a reply to Rajya Sabha MP Shantaram Naik, pointed out to specific flaws in the Panjim Smart City proposal that led to the city losing the funds. The minister in his reply said there were some ‘specific gaps in the proposal’ including ‘lack of quantified service indicators, inadequate justification of urban design, lack of spatial detailing, inclusiveness,’ etc. The flaws were in all three sectors that the proposal was judged upon – city level criteria, area based development, pan city and solutions.
Panjim selected its consultant from the list that the Centre had provided. The consultant should, therefore, have been aware of the requirements of the Urban Development Ministry and drafted the proposal to meet these requirements. From this, the question that arises, and which Herald put to the representatives of the consultants and the CCP was ‘weren’t they aware of how the proposal had to be structured and what were the points that needed to be included?’
The consultants and the CCP turned down the opportunity to answer this question, stating they were busy drawing up the revised proposal. It is precisely since the core group of the Smart City Plan is undertaking an exercise to redraft the plan that Herald wanted to put into perspective what went wrong in the first round. The new proposal that Panjim will be placing before the Centre will be judged on the same criteria and hence it is absolutely necessary not to repeat the flaws as that would lose Panjim the funds under the programme, that it now has a chance of getting.
The core team has identified the flaws in the proposal as shared by the Centre and drafted its response to this and even put a statement on its response. Even a cursory scan of this response shows that the redrafted plan will have more specific proposals than general statements of what the city hopes to achieve with the funds that the Centre will release. But again, as in the first time, the city is fighting against time to put together a proper and well-constructed proposal.
The CCP gave its nod for a revised draft only on Monday, and the core team is holding a public consultation for fresh inputs on Tuesday. The upgraded proposal will be placed before the high-powered select committee and the CCP council on Wednesday. After the public consultation ends, the core team has less than 24 hours to finalise the proposal before it is put forward to the HPSC and the CCP council. This does not leave the core team time to incorporate too many of the suggestions that will be coming in from the public in the new plan, giving rise to doubts that the public consultation will be merely a charade. After that the government goes on a four-day holiday before any work can get started again.
In the first instance Panjim was late to get off the mark, selecting a consultant when other cities were already working on their plans. Now too, the elections to the corporation having come in the way, the capital city has again lost time. Repeating a mistake is not a smart way to start working on redrafting a proposal for a smart city project.
