One on One | Hitesh Vaidya, Director, NIUA
“Indian cities proved their mettle during the pandemic” The COVID-19 brought with it various difficulties and challenges, particularly for urban local bodies (ULBs), who had to ensure continuity of essential services even during some of the world’s strictest lockdowns. At the same time, they also had to make sure that neither the residents, nor their employees were infected with the virus and that the economically backward sections of society, a majority of which lost their source of income during the lockdowns, had access to three meals a day and a roof over their head. In the midst of all this, ULBs in India did not stop working on climate change related projects either, showing their will to reverse global warming. To know more about how they were able to do all this, and what role the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) played in assisting them, Abhishek Pandey, Editor, Urban Update, interviewed Hitesh Vaidya, Director, NIUA During the pandemic, how did cities respond so quickly? What was the Government of India’s plan when dealing with this new challenge of COVID-19? The Centre came up with plans for street vendors, medical professionals, SWM, etc. What was NIUA’s role and how was it supporting the government in this?
I think a lot of things have changed in going from the pre-pandemic to the post-pandemic world. It is almost like the division of ‘Before Christ’ and ‘After Christ’. That is the change that we are looking at now. NIUA, as you know, is a think-tank of the Government of India. Our key mandate is to build capacities of ULBs, conduct on-ground research and advocate reforms and new ways of doing things. I think all three mandates were really followed after the pandemic. Cities have, I will say, responded really well during the pandemic. We used to say that our cities are not prepared but I particularly feel that the way they responded to the pandemic situation was a great way of handling the situation and I think our cities did a much better job than any other city in the world. And our work
24 September 2021 | www.urbanupdate.in
was comparable to all other cities. After the pandemic, the main task is that cities have to rebuild their infrastructure, capacities, and their way of citizen-engagement. And NIUA is supporting them in this rebuilding exercise by building templates, preparing DPRs, and defining standards, so that cities can respond to the needs in a better way. Instead of each city preparing their own template, we can provide a standardized template to all of them so that they can prepare their project faster. Secondly, we are also providing information on the technologies available, both in terms of digital and infrastructure technologies. We are creating a repository of technologies, which can be made available to the cities and they can appropriately select those technologies, contextualize them according to their environment and apply them. Thirdly, we are conducting training and capacity building workshops. We have started the National Urban Learning Platform, for which we have almost 27 institutes and 83 partners. With this, we are moving towards e-learning, where we can reach the scale of Indian ULBs much faster.
Fourthly, we are recording the good practices that a lot of Indian cities have done during the pandemic. And we are making them available to 4000 local bodies across the country, where if one city has done it, others can follow suit. So we are becoming a repository of innovations, best practices, and of different technologies. And that is how we are supporting not just smart cities, but all 4000 ULBs across India. Talking about 4000 ULBs, India is a vast country in terms of local governance. In the post-pandemic world, the effects of climate change are imminent and they are going to affect our cities badly. India ranks 7th among the most affected countries globally, as per the Global Climate Risk Index 2021. So we think that India is on an urbanisation fast-track, we are building cities, we are bringing so many schemes and missions for rebuilding cities and making them resilient, smart and effective. How do you see the Climate Smart City Framework Assessment by the NIUA, which is very timely, is going to impact at
