India Smart Cities Awards 2022

Context

Recently, India Smart Cities Awards (ISAC) has been announced for the year 2022.

About the Award:

Smart Cities Awards India is an initiative that highlights and honours the cities with the finest practices and city models.
Objective: The motto of the award is to encourage cities to practise approaches to making cities habitable, ecological, and financially feasible.
Organised by: The Smart Cities Mission, by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.
This is the fourth edition of the ISAC awards.
In the past, the ISAC witnessed three editions in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
The 2022 edition was launched in April last year during the ‘Smart Cities-Smart Urbanization’ event in Surat.

India Smart Cities Award Contest (ISAC), 2022:

For Cities:
- Indore has adjudged the best Smart City for exemplary performance in the Smart Cities Mission.
Surat and Agra are the second and third-place winners among cities,
States-wise:
- Madhya Pradesh has been chosen as the top State.
- Tamil Nadu is the second in the State category
- Followed by Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.
For UTs: The award for the best Union Territory has gone to

A total of 845 nominations were received for ISAC 2022 out of which 66 final winners have been identified in various categories.

Criteria for selection of cities:

The ISAC recognises and rewards cities, projects and innovative ideas that are promoting sustainable development across the 100 smart cities, as well as stimulating inclusive, equitable, safe, healthy and collaborative cities leading to a better quality of life for all.
The ISAC 2022 award had a two-stage submission process consisting of;
‘Qualifying Stage’, which involved overall assessment of the city’s performance, and
The ‘Proposal Stage’ which required the smart cities to submit their nominations for six award categories.

Significance:

The Smart Cities Award India takes this platform as an opportunity to honour recognise and encourage people, legislators, businesses, townships, government organisations, and associations for their efforts in both the urban and rural sectors.

Smart Cities Mission:

The Smart Cities Mission is an initiative of the Union Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry.
It was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on June 25, 2015.
Cities across the country were asked to submit proposals for projects to improve municipal services and to make their jurisdictions more liveable.
Between January 2016 and June 2018 (when the last city, Shillong, was chosen), the Ministry selected 100 cities for the Mission over five rounds.
The projects were supposed to be completed within five years of the selection of the city, but in 2021 the Ministry changed the deadline for all cities to June 2023.
Objective:
- The main objective of the Mission is to promote cities that provide core infrastructure, clean and sustainable environment and give a decent quality of life to their citizens through the application of ‘smart solutions’.
- The Mission aims to drive economic growth and improve quality of life through comprehensive work on social, economic, physical and institutional pillars of the city.