Socially Smart Bhubaneswar Adjudged Second Best under Social Aspects Category at India Smart City Awards Contest

Bhubaneswar: Continuing its stride as a leading Smart city of India. Temple City Bhubaneswar today bagged two more awards in the India Smart City Awards Contest (IASC) by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) during the Sixth Anniversary Celebration of Smart City Mission, AMRUT and PMAY (Urban). The awards, commonly called as IASC-2020, were declared this afternoon by MoHUA in New Delhi in which all 100 Smart Cities participated.

Two of the major projects of Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited (BSCL) i.e. Socially Smart Bhubaneswar and city’s unified citizen service portal Bhubaneswar.Me were the prize winners in Social Aspects and Governance Categories.

While the Socially Smart Bhubaneswar was adjudged the second best in Social Aspects Category, Bhubaneswar.Me was adjudged third under Governance Category. While Tirupati and Tumakuru got the first and third places in the Special Projects Category, under Governance Vododora and Thane were adjudged first and second respectively.

Expressing his happiness over BSCL’s achievement in the IASC-2020 Awards Smart City CEO Sri Sanjay Kumar Singh said “we have achieved these awards with our innovations and ideas and in future the city will come up with more such citizen-centric projects. The Smart City Project works will be expedited and I hope in future we will win more such awards during Smart City Challenge.’’

Socially Smart Bhubaneswar
“People centric programme for making Bhubaneswar a socially smart city” is a joint collaborative initiative of BSCL and UNFPA which takes the cognizance of the needs of the young people in the context of the prosperity, safety equity and sustenance.
It is a collaborative project of Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation and BSCL with UNFPA, in which Humara Bachpan is the implementation partner. This aims to transform Bhubaneswar through improved infrastructure, technology, economic drive and quality of life for people and will contribute to achieving the SDG 11 (Sustainable cities and communities).

The project started from 1st Jan 2017 in 8 slums of BTCD area and now 100 slums and about 80 educational institutions are reached under the project. Young people are the main stakeholders of the project both at community level and institutional level.
The objectives of the Socially Smart Bhubaneswar project is to develop a youth-centric and youth-led integrated social intervention model to support citizens connect initiative.

It also aims to promote safety and security of girls and women in Bhubaneswar with specific focus on urban slums through community partnerships and to increase availability and accessibility of social, health and other development programmes for the vulnerable and marginalized population.

The Peer Leaders or “Pragati Sathis’’ trained under this project have also contributed towards the upliftment of health, sanitation and social issues including their services during the COVID-19 pandemic

Bhubaneswar.Me

Bhubaneswar.me is part of city’s governance and Bhubaneswar city administration wants to bring transparency through this initiative. This initiative also helped citizen to achieve common service requirement with this application. Bhubaneswar.me is a unified service portal which currently delivers 100+ citizen services from 16 government organisations that is divided in 9 broad categories of public amenities such as search for safe public transport, access of hi-speed WIFI system, citizen services, City events, city maps etc.

At present it has a user base of more than 4 lakh citizens and more than 2 lakhs grievances has been resolved with this portal. The portal has customised dashboard for officers and citizens to track their requested services. This portal is also equipped with citizen document locker and an interactive chat bot for easy access of the application user.

The broad segments of Bhubaneswar.Me include :

1. City Wi – Fi – Access, Recharge and Lodging complaints on city wide Wi Fi system for the citizens.
2. Public Transport – Real time information of the Mo Bus, with provisioning for integration with Mo Cycle application and e – rickshaw.
3. Odyssey Smart Card – Pay and recharge for public transport, retail, utilities, parking and municipal services through Odyssey Card which is a single payment card for a spectrum of services available in the city.
4. Visit Bhubaneswar – An exclusive module for the visitor to help them explore the Temple city with authenticated information.
5. Citizen Services – A gamut of citizen services are being offered through the portal ranging from Grievance Redressal to Building Plan Approval System, with a dedicated and configurable officer workflow enhancing efficiency, transparency and accountability in the overall service delivery paradigm.
6. City Events – List of events across the city with booking of tickets.
7. Public Amenities and Space – This section provides a feature of locating amenities and space and rating of these spaces to help city administration enhance and improve the facilities.
8. City Map – This helps people navigate across the city using the GIS map. It has a seamless officer workflow for updating attributes for accurate information
9. City Agencies – List and Redirection to all city agencies website.