THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Thiruvananthapuram smart city campaign is inching closer to a finish, with the second level of public consultations starting on Wednesday. The smart city team has gone through more than 10,000 proposals, and has identified key sectors on which the deliberations should be focussed. The team, which consists of urban design engineers and planners, will meet experts chosen from various fields over the week. A member of the team said, “We have eliminated the less important sectors. The list of sectors will be further shortened.” This will be followed by more public consultations.
It will be the people who will take the final call, according to another member of the team. How? In the forms submitted by the people during ward consultations and various stakeholder meetings, they were asked to rank their needs. The needs which get the most votes would be given a priority. In addition, the consultancy, Infrastructure Development Corporation (Karnataka) Limited (IDeCK), will prepare a list of priority sectors based on their study of Thiruvananthapuram.
“They are trained to read a city. The spatial distribution of infrastructure, land value and a host of other features will be studied, to understand what is ideal. They have several tools to analyse and understand a city,” said a team member. It is important to compare, because what the people want may not always be practical. The constraints are more for this round of smart city competitors. If selected, the project should be finished by 2019-2020 financial year. The cities chosen in the earlier rounds had got more time.
