The Smart Cities remains one of the most ambitious and most challenging urban development projects. Developing 100 smart cities is a big task. It requires bringing together many agencies including various state governments, investors, private players, institutions, individuals and citizens – required to work in cohesion for the successful execution of the grand vision.

The task cannot be completed in one or two years. The city building is a continuous process and redeveloping the existing cities has its own share of challenges and difficulties.

Even the Smart Cities Mission guidelines had highlighted the fact that it will take at least 4-5 years before the smart cities will start taking shape. The cities can achieve the dream of becoming smart cities by adopting innovative solutions after recognizing their specific city problems.

In last one year many Indian cities are coming up with such smart solutions to address the problems in terms of mobility, infrastructure, citizen engagement, environment and sustainability.

The BW Smart Cities Awards 2016 was conceptualized to recognize pioneering projects, individuals, government agencies and leaders working towards making cities more livable, sustainable and economically viable by adopting best practices and models.

Recognition of the efforts being made by Indian cities by BW Smart Cities will encourage other cities to do better.

Process And Selection
The purpose of the Awards was to identify cities, projects and innovative ideas which can help in achieving sustainable urban development. The entry was open to all the participants who have to showcase how effectively they helped to solve a problem by providing innovative solutions.

Recognizing the real spirit of public private partnership, the award was open to both the city municipal bodies as well as the private solution providers. The main objective behind the selection of the winners was to identify and back innovative solutions that could help to change citizen’s lives by increasing efficiency, generating business and improving the quality of life.

The BW Smart Cities along the knowledge partner PwC, carefully picked the best innovative solutions from cities, companies, non-government organization, think-tanks and consortium under 14 categories.

The awards received over 100 entries across various categories. After carefully analysing all the entries from all the participants, PwC with the help of jury selected winners under 12 separate categories. The jury was consisted of Purushottam Kaushik, independent expert and ex MD, Cisco, Karuna Gopal urban expert and Columnist, Manojit Bose, senior director- Smart Cities, IT and eGovernance at NASSCOM, R.K Jain, expert on Disaster Management and Srikanta K Panigrahi, director general of Carbon Minus India.

The focus area for the awards was on one of the following areas: Innovative Smart Solution Infrastructure; Innovative Smart Solution Access and Mobility; Innovative Smart Solution Social; Innovative Smart Solution Environment, Smart Innovative Solution Institution, Innovative Smart Solution, Knowledge and Intellectual, Smart Private Township, Smart Greenfield City, Smart Cities Academic Programme, Smart Cities Leader of the year and Best smart cities.

“Smart innovative solutions” remained the core value for selecting the winners.

In selecting the best smart city, the jury unanimously decided on selecting more than one winner. “It will be highly unfair if we select one city on the basis of one year’s performance. The purpose of the award is to highlight the cities that demonstrate having strategies, initiatives and policies developed for its citizens and the right will to implement it through proactive measures. It is because of this reason we have decided to consider four cities which have shown enough progress in last one year and are setting examples for rest of the cities,” the jury said.

Recognizing the need of creating greenfield cities, the jury unanimously decided on Amaravati, the future state capital of Andhra Pradesh. For the Smart City Leader of the year, the jury decided on Vivek Aggarwal, the young commissioner, Directorate of Urban Administration & Development, Madhya Pradesh for successfully spearheading the urbanization project in the state. Considered as one of the Jewels of Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s cabinet, Vivek Aggarwal is a man behind the urban planning in the state of Madhya Pradesh.