City Shift: Housing Ministry lays route map for Smart Cities SPVs beyond MissieDeadline; New advice proposes five teeth in urban development – Times of India

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs gave detailed advice on Tuesday to reuse the Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) that were founded under the Smart Cities mission, aimed at utilizing their institutional capacity for long-term urban transformation, even after the closure of the scheme on 31 March. The advice encourages states and trade union areas to identify urgent urban development priorities and to allocate new strategic roles to the SPVs, which were originally formed to plan and implement infrastructure projects at city level under the Smart Cities Mission 2015. According to the Ministry, the SPVs will now be led to operate in five broad domains: technology support, project implementation, advice, research and assessment and investment facilitation. These areas reflect an attempt to more closely integrate SPVs with the current agendas for the development of the state and the city. The government noted that SPVs of Smart Cities have demonstrated their ability to deliver complex, cross-sectoral projects with efficiency and innovation in the past decade. The Ministry also emphasized the investments in setting up integrated command and control centers (ICCCs), which played a key role in urban administration and data-driven decision-making. With the Smart Cities mission officially completed, the switch from the center to re -use SPVs is aimed at maintaining the momentum of urban innovation and strengthening the technical and management capacity of urban local authorities. The advice is intended as a strategic framework for states to ensure that these specially built institutions continue to tackle developing urban challenges in areas such as infrastructure, technology and services.