Recipe for a smart village

In the last budget, the government of India assigned Rs9,000 crore as the budget for Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation. But I think the government needs to pause and think again. Do we really need smarter cities? Or should we be making our villages smarter?

When we create a smart city, we try to enhance the efficiency of the city, thereby attracting more attention, and more people into the city and encouraging rural-to-urban migration. But that is not a healthy sign of development, as it does not leave room and opportunity for the country as a whole to grow. Instead of focusing our development and tools to enhance smartness in tier I cities, the government needs to make more efforts at creating tier II and tier III smart cities, and going further down to creating smart districts, taluks and panchayats.

If such an approach is adopted, efficiency will start moving from the bottom to the top, rather than a top-down approach. This will also curb migration to cities and reduce the burden on infrastructure in the cities. Let us not forget that reducing the burden on limited resources is true smartness. The government needs to think about creating 250,000 smart panchayats. Or it can start with a smaller target. It can select 10 gram panchayats for a pilot project, and then scale up. Read more….