Page 156 - Connecting cities and communities with the Sustainable Development Goals

United for Smart Sustainable Cities
Connecting cities and communities with the Sustainable Development Goals

1 Introduction

1.1 Background
India has launched its 100 smart city mission in 2015. This initiative strives to make 100 cities across the
country more sustainable using technology. Within this initiative, India also plans to make their cities more
citizen-centric. The MyGov (https://www.mygov.in/) portal was created for this purpose. This portal has
proved to be a very effective tool in people’s participation in governance. For a country of the size of India,
with 1.25 billion people, with diverse backgrounds, this portal is quite a success as can be seen from the
number of engagements on the site itself. In this sense, this portal assists with the achievement of Sustainable
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Development Goal (SDG) 16 .
India has a large number of cities with a population above 1 million. Ensuring that the government involves
people in the process of governance in a democratic setup, this type of portal seems to be quite an effective
way forward. This model can be replicated at the city level for local governance for smart sustainable cities.

In a city like New Delhi, which happens to be the capital of the largest democracy in the world, an influx from
other parts of the country is imperative. As New Delhi has been expanding due to its increasing population,
the infrastructure has come under tremendous pressure. Designation of the National Capital Region, allows
for adjoining cities to share the population burden of the capital. However, with the passage of time, even
these adjoining cities have come to face similar challenges vis-à-vis population growth.

1.2 Challenge and response
The challenge in a developing economy like India is to meet the aspirations of the 1.25 billion people with a
population of more than 800 million people below the age of 35. Being a democracy, getting feedback from
the stakeholders, improving accountability and taking corrective or preventive action, as needed, is essential.
More than 400 million people live in cities, and the number of cities in India with a population of more than
5 million is more than 100. Getting citizens’ participation in the governance of the cities would make the
cities more accountable and easy to receive feedback on services through portals of this kind. As such the
MyGov portal is able to ensure that the genuine suggestions are honoured and implemented. The feedback
mechanism on this portal is also able to foster reliability within the urban governance structure.

2 The project(s)

2.1 Vision and content
The vision behind the setting up of this portal is to translate the aspirations of the majority of citizens in a
city into implementable projects and programmes, and to also obtain feedback from citizens about the
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projects and programmes since their implementation, as envisioned in SDG 17 .
The portal has got more than 50 open groups for facilitating discussions including:
ƒ Smart Cities
ƒ Consumer Protection

ƒ Human Resource Development
ƒ Disaster Management
ƒ Skill Development

49 Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build
effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
50 Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

150 U4SSC series