Not smart city, we just want water and power

Running water is available for just two hours every two days. Only 130 of 125,000 homes in the city are connected to the sewage system. Dirty water flows in open drains in cramped neighborhoods. Stepwells and lakes have become garbage dumps. Illegal buildings and slums dot the city. And only two traffic lights work.

But soon, Ajmer could be transformed into a 21st-century “smart city” — an urban-planning term for the gleaming metropolises of the future that Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to create by 2022.

These modern marvels would be connected by grids in which water, electricity, waste removal, traffic, hospitals and schools are seamlessly integrated with information technology to run them more efficiently.

“Can we first work toward becoming a functioning city before aspiring to be a smart city? We lack even the basic services that a city should typically provide,” said Suresh Mathur, a retired schoolteacher who runs a city cleanliness drive called “My Clean School.”

Other critics have dismissed Modi’s smart-cities plan as a 21st-century urban utopia, as a distant Neverland and Orwellian. They say that the idea is more suitable for richer nations whose citizens can afford to take basic urban services such as drinking water, toilets or electricity for granted.

“The Western definition of the smart city is spineless, if not altogether redundant in India — a mere glossing over of civic services and infrastructure,” Gautam Bhatia, an architect and author on urban design, wrote in The Hindu newspaper

confuzzled dude wrote:

Running water is available for just two hours every two days. Only 130 of 125,000 homes in the city are connected to the sewage system. Dirty water flows in open drains in cramped neighborhoods. Stepwells and lakes have become garbage dumps. Illegal buildings and slums dot the city. And only two traffic lights work.

But soon, Ajmer could be transformed into a 21st-century “smart city” — an urban-planning term for the gleaming metropolises of the future that Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to create by 2022.

These modern marvels would be connected by grids in which water, electricity, waste removal, traffic, hospitals and schools are seamlessly integrated with information technology to run them more efficiently.

“Can we first work toward becoming a functioning city before aspiring to be a smart city? We lack even the basic services that a city should typically provide,” said Suresh Mathur, a retired schoolteacher who runs a city cleanliness drive called “My Clean School.”

Other critics have dismissed Modi’s smart-cities plan as a 21st-century urban utopia, as a distant Neverland and Orwellian. They say that the idea is more suitable for richer nations whose citizens can afford to take basic urban services such as drinking water, toilets or electricity for granted.

“The Western definition of the smart city is spineless, if not altogether redundant in India — a mere glossing over of civic services and infrastructure,” Gautam Bhatia, an architect and author on urban design, wrote in The Hindu newspaper

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-wants-to-build-100-smart-cities-residents-just-want-water-and-power/2015/06/25/9951df1a-0ec6-11e5-a0fe-dccfea4653ee_story.html