Allocation of ₹ 7060 Crores for Smart Cities

The Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley has provided a sum of ₹ 7060 crores in the current financial year for developing 100 smart cities. Announcing in his maiden Budget Speech in the Parliament, Shri Jaitley said that the Prime Minister has a vision of developing one hundred ‘Smart cities’ as satellite towns of larger cities and by modernizing the existing mid-sized cities.

The Finance Minister said that with development reaching an increasingly large number of people, the pace of migration from the rural areas to the cities is increasing. The new cities should be developed to accommodate the burgeoning number of people. Otherwise, the existing cities would soon become unlivable.