Several states, including Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and West Bengal, have shown interest in setting up greenfield smart cities along industrial corridors and the Centre will decide on the location through a challenge method, a senior government officer said.
“We will go for a challenge to decide the states that will get the projects,” Guruprasad Mohapatra, secretary for industrial promotion and internal trade, said. In the Budget, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced the setting up of five new smart cities in PPP mode. Already, new cities in Dadri (UP), Dholera (Gujarat), Shendra Bidkin (Maharashtra) and Vikram Udyogpuri (Madhya Pradesh) are coming up along the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor.
A similar model will be followed along new industrial corridors such as Delhi-Kolkata, Kolkata-Chennai, Mumbai-Bengaluru and Chennai-Bengaluru, where the state will provide land and the Centre will provide equity to a special purpose vehicle. The SPV will raise resources to create infrastructure and plug-and-play facility. The state will provide infrastructure such as water and power supply.
States that provide land first and sign a state support scheme to back the development are expected to be preferred, sources said.
Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com