Naveen Congratulates Rourkela Smart City on Being Shortlisted for Nurturing Neighbourhoods Challenge Cohort

Bhubaneswar: Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has congratulated Rourkela Smart City for securing its place in the top 25 cities in the Nurturing Neighbourhood Challenge Cohort, launched by the Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs.

“Congratulations @smartcityrkl on being shortlisted for the Nurturing Neighbourhoods Challenge cohort of @MoHUA_India in collaboration with @BvLFoundation & @WRICitiesIndia. The 3 year initiative aimed at enhancing the quality of life of children in the neighbourhoods”, the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) tweeted.

Congratulations @smartcityrkl on being shortlisted for the Nurturing Neighbourhoods Challenge cohort of @MoHUA_India in collaboration with @BvLFoundation & @WRICitiesIndia. The 3 year initiative aimed at enhancing the quality of life of children in the neighbourhoods. https://t.co/psXX7SAI1C

— CMO Odisha (@CMO_Odisha) February 19, 2021

Adding another feather to its’ cap the Rourkela Smart City secured its place in the top 25 cities in the Nurturing Neighbourhood Challenge, launched by the Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs, Govt. of India.

It is hosted by the Smart Cities Mission, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India, in collaboration with the Bernard van Leer Foundation and WRI India.

The Nurturing Neighbourhoods Challenge was aimed to incorporate a focus on early childhood development (0-5-year-old children) in the planning and management of cities.

The Nurturing Neighbourhoods Challenge is a 3-year initiative that aims to work with cities and their partners to pilot and scale ways to improve public space, mobility, neighbourhood planning, access to early childhood services and amenities, and data management across city agencies. It will also build a platform for peer-to-peer learning and sharing best practices between cities.

The Challenge enables cities to adopt an early childhood lens in designing neighbourhood-level improvements that promote the health and well-being of young children and their caregivers. The challenge was aimed to provide technical and capacity building support to experiment and pilot early childhood-oriented solutions.

The objectives of the challenge is to Promote early childhood centric approach among the cities and to equip city authorities with the language and rationale of early childhood-centric development to apply it in their decision making; to support in scaling up of solutions by implementing policy interventions, multiple pilot projects, measuring the impact, and capacity building; to support selected city authorities to adopt the principles in designing and implementing pilot projects for early childhood-centric infrastructure and services; to facilitate capacity building for officials within various cities and develop a network of champions for early childhood to engage with each other and share learnings on best practices; to inform decision-making, develop use cases and best practices, and disseminate the same through capacity building activities.

For participating in the challenge; the Rourkela Smart City have given proposals for 5 peer projects related to creation of Infant, Toddler, Caregiver – friendly neighbourhood with key components like safe, green, accessible, playful and inclusive framework. The projects were prepared by reimagining public open spaces for play and interaction, learning while playing, adapting public spaces with early childhood amenities like Baby feeding booth etc., making streets safe and walkable for young children and their caregivers and improving access to early childhood services, such as Anganwadis and health centres with state of art amenities.

The Commissioner, Rourkela Municipal Corporation and the CEO, Rourkela Smart City Limited Dibyajyoti Parida told that, while preparing the projects it was emphasized to formulate the vision for early childhood-centric development with targeting young children and their families by consulting with multiple stakeholders.

The projects were designed in such a way so that the children can learn many things while playing in the open spaces through specialised smart education tools. The exisiting Anganwadi Kendras are also to be redeveloped as smart education centres with advanced amenities and infrastructures. Baby feeding booths will be provisioned at key open spaces for ensuring comfort to the feeding mothers, Baby Tran vehicle friendly walkway in parks and zebra crossing near Children Park will be made for easy accessibility and Crèche schools for children of working parents. Apart from that, there are plans to transform the city schools into smart schools. These smart schools will have smart class rooms with robotic based learning module for easy accessibility of students. These schools will have student friendly atmosphere with state of art facilities like any other developed public schools in order to ensure holistic development for the children and of course for the Infant, Toddler and their parents; said the CEO, Rourkela Smart City.