India: British market research agency Juniper Research has listed Bhubaneswar among the top 20 best performing smart cities in the world, reported the Indian daily Telegraph.
Bhubaneswar is the only Indian city to be included in the list. The study focused on four broad areas such as mobility, health, safety, and productivity. Bhubaneswar ranked 13th on the safety parameter while it came at 20th spot on mobility, health and productivity.
The study, titled Global Smart City Performance Index-2017, was released on March 12 on the official website of Juniper Research.
In the study, Bhubaneswar was judged along with other cities in the world, including Singapore, London, San Francisco, Berlin, Dubai, Barcelona, Melbourne, Seoul, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and San Diego. Different cities got different ranks with Singapore topping the list in all the four categories.
Singapore occupied the top slot in all the parameters, while London and New York were at second and third position respectively. Bhubaneswar finished in 19th place overall.
Bhubaneshwar has featured in smart city rankings in the past as well. In November 2016, the city became one of the finalists to compete for the top slot in World Smart City Expo held in Barcelona.
“We topped the smart city list in the country, which resulted in more and more foreign countries evincing interest in helping us develop Bhubaneswar,” said mayor Ananta Narayan Jena to the Telegraph.
Jena said they were trying to improve Bhubaneswar in every manner and would continue to do so with the active participation of the citizens and a dynamic workforce.
Bhubaneshwar also has many other feathers in its cap in smart city rankings.
Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy (Janaagraha), a Bengaluru-based non-profit released the 5th edition of its Annual Survey of India’s City-Systems (ASICS) report. The study, which evaluates the quality of governance in cities, in its 2017 edition covered 23 major cities in India across 20 states based on 89 questions.
The Study reveals that Bhubaneswar has made considerable progress in terms of its urban governance in the last two years. In 2015 Survey, Bhubaneswar was Ranked 18th which improved to Rank 10 in 2016 survey and now in the 2017 Survey, Bhubaneswar was tied with a score of 4.6 along with Kolkata and Thiruvananthapuram, just below Pune which made it to the Top of the Ranking. In terms of the increase in score, Bhubaneswar was the second highest improvement of 1.1 just below Surat, which showed an improvement in score by 1.3.
It is to be noted that major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Benguluru, Hyderabad, etc. are ranked lower in the Table. Among the Medium cities category (up to 1 million population), Bhubaneswar is at the top along with Thiruvanantapuram.
The city has also received recognition from various other sources, including the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs conferring the First position to Bhubaneswar in the National level Smart City Challenge in 2016. The Canadian Institute of Planner awarded the Planning Excellence Merit Award in 2016. In 2017, the city was awarded the Pierre l’enfant International Planning award by the prestigious American Planning Association (APA) for its Smart City Plan. The City was also the Finalist in the World Smart City Awards at Barcelona in 2016.
