US$349 million set aside for smart cities this year, down from US$1.2 billion last year.
Budget for India’s 100 smart cities project have seen a big dip in the 2015-16 Budget announced on 1 March.
This comes as countries around the world race to share their expertise on city planning and sign deals with Indian states to build new cities.
This year the Budget allocates INR 21.6 billion (US$349 million) to develop cities which will rely on technology to run their transport, utilities, housing, healthcare, safety and other municipal services.
This is down from the INR 70.16 billion (US$1.2 billion) allocated to the project last year, soon after the Narendra Modi government came into power and announced his plans for the project in June. The government spent INR 9.3 billion of this money in 2014-15.
India has signed deals to build eight cities - three with Germany, three with the United States, and one each with Spain and Singapore.
Digital India
Smart cities got no mention in Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s (pictured) speech, but he said that the Digital India programme is making “good progress”.
Budget for the programme, including e-government and IT skills development, has seen a small dip this year. It gets INR 8.4 billion (US$136 million) this year, down from INR 9.2 billion (US$149 million) last year.
The biggest chunk of this - INR 4 billion (US$65 million) - will go towards delivering online services. The government has also given INR 1.15 billion (US$19 million) for cyber security activities, on which the government spent INR 460 million (US$7.4 million) last year.
India has also set aside INR 1.35 billion (US$22 million) for a national knowledge network connecting 1500 educational institutes.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Medha Basu
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 03.03.2015
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