Magdalena Cooper, Intern

The Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) will be created by each city to implement the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) at the city level. The SPV will be in charge of planning, appraising, approving, releasing funds, implementing, managing, operating, monitoring and evaluating the projects in their city. The States will ensure that there is a dedicated revenue stream for the SPV and the SPV should evolve its own credit-worthiness for raising additional resources from the market.

Ponneri is currently a small town located north of Chennai which lies in the middle of lush fields and numerous water bodies. However, all of this will soon change. Last Saturday a colleague and I were able to go visit some of the areas around the planned smart city of Ponneri and envision the drastic changes that this area will undergo if the development plan goes through.

In 2015,the Modi government announced that 100 cities had been shortlisted to compete for funds under a new urban development initiative called the Smart Cities Mission. Since then, 20 cities, including Chennai, have won the first round of funds based on their proposals for smart projects in their city.  The idea of a smart city is a global idea with no universally accepted definition.