Bhubaneswar wins two awards in smart city contest

Bhubaneswar (Odisha) [India], June 26 (ANI): As India celebrated the sixth anniversary of the Smart Cities Mission on Friday, Bhubaneswar bagged two more awards in the India Smart City Awards Contest (IASC) organised by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA).
The awards, commonly called as IASC-2020, were declared yesterday afternoon by MoHUA in New Delhi in which all 100 Smart Cities participated.
Two of the major projects of Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited (BSCL) i.e. "Socially Smart Bhubaneswar" and City's unified citizen service portal "Bhubaneswar Me" were the prize winners in Social Aspects and Governance Categories.
While the "Socially Smart Bhubaneswar" was adjudged the second best in Social Aspects Category, "Bhubaneswar Me" was adjudged third under Governance Category. While Tirupati and Tumakuru got the first and third places in the Social Aspects Category, under Governance Vododora and Thane were adjudged first and second respectively.
Expressing his happiness over BSCL's achievement in the IASC-2020 Awards Smart City CEO Sanjay Kumar Singh said, "We have achieved these awards with our innovations and ideas and in the future the city will come up with more such citizen-centric projects. The Smart City Project works will be expedited and I hope in future we will win more such awards during Smart City Challenge.''
As per the press release, "Socially Smart Bhubaneswar" is a people-centric programme for making Bhubaneswar a socially smart city and is a joint collaborative initiative of BSCL and UNFPA which takes the cognizance of the needs of the young people in the context of the prosperity, safety equity and sustenance.
It is a collaborative project of Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation and BSCL with UNFPA, in which Hamara Bachpan is the implementation partner. This aims to transform Bhubaneswar through improved infrastructure, technology, economic drive and quality of life for people and will contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 11 (Sustainable cities and communities).
The project started in January 1, 2017, in 8 slums of the BTCD area and now 100 slums and about 80 educational institutions are reached under the project. Young people are the main stakeholders of the project both at community level and institutional level.
The objectives of the "Socially Smart Bhubaneswar" project is to develop a youth-centric and youth-led integrated social intervention model to support citizens connect initiative.
It also aims to promote safety and security of girls and women in Bhubaneswar with specific focus on urban slums through community partnerships and to increase availability and accessibility of social, health and other development programmes for the vulnerable and marginalized population.
The Peer Leaders or 'Pragati Sathis' capacitated under this project have also contributed towards the uplift of health, sanitation and social issues including their services during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Bhubaneswar Me" portal is part of city governance and Bhubaneswar city administration wants to bring transparency through this initiative. This initiative also helped citizens to achieve common service requirement with this application. "Bhubaneswar Me" is a unified service portal that currently delivers 100+ citizen services from 16 government organisations that is divided in 9 broad categories of public amenities such as the search for safe public transport, access of high-speed WIFI system, citizen services, City events, city maps etc.
At present it has a user base of more than 4 lakh citizens and more than 2 lakhs grievances has been resolved with this portal. The portal has a customised dashboard for officers and citizens to track their requested services. This portal is also equipped with a citizen document locker and an interactive chat-box for easy access of the application user.
"Congratulations @BSCL_BBSR on winning 2nd prize in @MoHUA_India's India Smart City Awards Contest for its #SociallySmartBhubaneswar project & 3rd prize in the Governance category for its Unique Mobile APP 'Bhubaneswar Me'. Odisha is committed to make cities liveable and inclusive", tweeted Odisha CMO. (ANI)