Tamil Nadu’s Tiruppur will be partnering with Gujarat’s Silvassa as its sister city to help the latter improve its implementation of smart city projects.
The initiative is a part of the Centre’s ‘sister city’ announcement across the country, in which the top 20 ‘best performing’ smart cities will be paired with 20 ‘least performing’ cities under the Smart City scheme.
Through the concept, the two cities have signed an agreement to share and improve their cultural and commercial understanding of each other, as well as for the lower performing city to learn from the higher performing one. The hope is that the two cities will develop deeper ties in various aspects, including city development, tourism, culture and trade.
As per reports, the Union Ministry for Urban Housing and Urban Affairs announced the top 20 smart cities on Sunday — Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Tiruppur, Ranchi, Bhopal, Surat, Kanpur, Indore, Visakhapatnam, Vellore, Vadodara, Nashik, Agra, Varanasi, Davanagere, Kota, Pune, Udaipur, Dehradun and Amravati — with respect to implementation of Smart Cities scheme.
“We are happy that our efforts are being recognised,” said K Sivakumar, the Corporation Commissioner of Tiruppur Municipal Corporation.
Adding that Tiruppur was selected among the top 20 smart cities in the country because of the progress it has made, Sivakumar said, “We have prepared a Detailed Project Report, called for tenders, and works are in progress. This is quite advanced and hence we have been tagged as one among the top 20 best performing cities under the Smart City project.”
Among the cities on the low performing list include Amritsar in Punjab, Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, Diu in Daman and Diu and Aizawl in Mizoram.
Though the Centre has set a deadline of February 20 for the sister cities to sign the Memorandum of Understanding, Sivakumar says that once the Silvassa town authorities contact their counterparts in Tiruppur, the ball will be set rolling. The government of India has also mandated a 100-day challenge to the least performing cities from the date of announcement to improve its ranking on the list.