The announcement to develop smart cities in each state is a positive step forward to developing well planned, self-contained and sustainable cities. Smart cities like GIFT, Gujarat can cater to India’s large financial services potential by offering global firms a world-class infrastructure and facilities and a quality life style. This will attract the top talent in the country by providing the finest quality of life all with integrated townships, IFSC and multi-specialty special economic zone (SEZ). The smart cities should be able to provide good balance between residential, commercial, retail and open spaces along with social and physical infrastructure. Usage of technology would result into optimization of natural resources, improved safety and security, bring in transparency and can improve the overall wellbeing of citizens.
Real Estate is one of the key component of Smart City. Development of new smart cities across the country would create multiple growth centres. This would results in increased economic activities around these locations and hence result into overall growth of real estate sector.
Mr. Prabhat Ranjan, CMD, Olympeo Infrastructure Pvt. Ltd.
“This is a very good example of a participatory approach between the centre and the state. What has emerged is a rich mix of urban India comprising, a wide range of urban agglomerations where the population base is as high as 1.25 crore to as low as 12,000. The smart city solutions identified for the selected cities would have a far reaching demonstration effect for the entire range of towns and cities across India. This will trigger urban redevelopment, rejuvenation and infrastructure augmentation, apart from providing smart technology based solutions with are not capital intensive and have the highest returns on quality of life.”
Mr. Saurabh Mehrotra – National Director, Advisory Services, Knight Frank India.
The overall objective of Smart city is promoting cities and provide them core infrastructure and give a decent quality of life to its citizen with application of smart solutions. Which means that road connectivity and corporate activity will improve in these areas. The market will start looking up once at such locations once the infrastructural changes takes place. The focus is on providing urban lifestyle to growing urban population which states the basic requirements like Smart buildings, educational institutions, hospitals, office places at shorter distances. It will increase the demand for commercial real estate in the coming year. It’s going to be win-win for all as India is leaping to be one of the largest economies, with Real Estate contribution to be around 13% of the GDP in next 10-12 years. There will be lot of new avenues for business and start-ups which will create employment opportunities in this cities. Currently metro cities play major role in improving economy the additional urban cities will contribute effectively towards the economic growth.
Mr. Shadab Malik- Founder and CEO, Commertia Internet Pvt ltd.
The government plans to spend over Rs 3 lakh crore over the next 5-6 years to recast urban cities. As per the plan by government, smart cities will have features like variety of transport options, citizen-friendly governance, smart solutions for infrastructure and services. This initiative will not only improve the quality of living in the city but will also reduce dependency on metro cities for employment. Due to better infrastructure and increased connectivity Tier II cities will have similar opportunities like tier I cities which will decrease migration of talent from the small towns and will also support reverse brain drain. The service industry will be benefited most among the other industries. The Smart Cities will also attract more investments which will also be positive for country’s economic growth.Smart city initiative will have a strong positive impact on the real estate sector. Currently, the real estate sector contributes around six percent to India’s GDP.
With the government’s vision of building 100 smart cities, many expect this share to increase to 10-12 percent by 2022.The overall objective of smart city is to provide alternative to growing urban population and scale up the lifestyle of tier II cities to urban lifestyle. The cities chosen in the list of Smart city development will attract investments from various sectors. Smart cities will have impact of cities adjoining it that will create its own culture for jobs and quality of life. There will be ample of opportunity for job creation in Tier II cities as they will be well connected with Metro cities. Looking at the social and physical infrastructural growth, industries and companies will shift their focus to these cities. We are optimistic about tier-II cities seeing good growth in real estate over the next three to four years.
Mr. Rahul Gugaliya , CEO Suyojit Group.
The concept of smart cities is something that is extremely relevant in today’s scenario of crumbling infrastructure in our rapidly urbanizing cities. Creating the smart cities initiative as a competition amongst cities is a highly innovative and exciting way to engage the stakeholders to participate in improving the quality of life for the citizens of each of the cities. Given the current situation in the cities the quantum of funds required to truly convert cities into smart cities as envisaged will require for more than the amount of money currently set aside for this project.
As cities become more live-able there is a greater demand for people to set up businesses in those cities as well as a greater demand for people to come and live in those cities. This has a direct correlation and impact on the demand for housing and the office sector in the cities.
There is a competition amongst countries for investment, amongst the states within the country and now amongst the cities as well. This certainly bodes well as cities compete with each other vying for investment to improve the overall infrastructure of the city.
Mr.Rohit Gera – Managing Director, Gera Developments
It is a revolutionary new concept, and speaks of the vision of our Prime Minister. With an estimated outlay of Rs. 48, 000 croreover the next five years, the smart cities project is sure to change the face of urban development in India. Just the announcement of it has created this huge buzz amongst the cities, all eagerly vying to know more details about this initiative, and wanting to get for themselves the tag of ‘a smart city.’ Such is the brag value being attached to it.
Clearly, like all other initiatives taken up by our Prime Minister, this too is a well thought out one. To be accepted as a smart city, one needs to complete the ‘City Challenge Competition’ which tests the city’s worth and is the preliminary step to know if the city is liable to be a smart city or not. With as many as 100 cities queued up to be developed into smart cities, this project will boost the realty sector, as well as improve the economy of India.
Whilst urban India continues to be the lottery ticket to many a rural dream, the urban infrastructure is woefully inadequate. Cities are extending beyond hitherto traditional boundary lines, large corporates have a requirement for larger offices, colleges aspire to have big campuses, the need for large recreational and entertainment centres catering to a burgeoning population – all things aspirational to lead a dream life attract a lot of people to our top cities. The resultant effect of this rapid urbanization is chaotic traffic, unending pressure on an overloaded infrastructure, space crunch, pollution and poor quality of life.
Clearly, to address all these issues, the smart cities will reduce the pressure faced by our top metropolitan cities by offering its residents a similar kind of lifestyle in the 100 proposed smart cities.
As more smart cities come up, needless to say the real estate sector will see a boom. The quality infrastructure that is a prerequisite of a smart city will cater to high profile industries and MNCs. With more industries, comes an increase in employment opportunities for more professionals, who will seek new apartments, all of which augur well for the real estate sector, and are bound to give the much needed fillip to the real estate industry.
Mr.ChintanSheth – Director, Sheth Corp.
The Smart Cities initiative taken up by Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi could be a game changer for the real estate industry, and for the country in general.
The honourable PM has expressed the hope that the face of urban infrastructure, which is woefully inadequate now, will change with the execution of the plan for creation of 100 smart cities and up-gradation of existing facilities in another 500 cities.
The bottom-up approach is an excellent move, he said and expressed the hope that the local self-governments will work in the right earnest. Real estate is typically a localized industry and the state and central governments at best could lay down policy guidelines, leaving the implementation to local level authorities.
We as developers are very happy that the Centre has realized this and we hope that the local governments and planners will work in a fair manner providing level playing field to all.
Urbanization is the need of the hour and it is good if the government facilitates this process with quick and easy approvals and hassle free allocation of land parcels.
Rajesh Prajapati – MD – Prajapati Constructions Limited.
