City: Bhubaneswar

With the Centre’s new guidelines to slowly kickstart the economy, Odisha, too, has announced partial lockdown relaxation. But the problems that formal and informal sectors here face now is representative of what all states will have to tackle post May 3rd.

CM Naveen Patnaik has been proactive in initiating some harsh measures to contain the spread of coronavirus. And the learnings and systems used to manage Cyclone Fani a few years back has come in useful in the state’s handling of the COVID outbreak.

Government, civil society and corporate bodies have joined hands to regreen cyclone-ravaged Bhubaneswar, but what is needed is not just replantation but also proper urban forest planning.

Extreme heat stress caused by high ‘wet bulb temperatures’ and urban heat island effect come into play in Odisha’s capital, that is often the hottest city in the country during summers. But what do these terms imply, and how are they a threat to the upcoming smart city?

While government disaster response teams focus on roads, electricity and other infrastructure, local community groups and volunteers try to mobilise residents to participate in the relief work being done in their localities, and especially the low income settlements.

Photos of the devastated city and the massive damage to tree cover in Bhubaneswar wrought by Cyclone Fani

Water, waste, traffic: A post-election chat with voters in Bhubaneswar, which went to polls on April 23rd, reveals that these nagging civic issues are what they expect their MP to take up and address!

Water ATMs now provide around 2.9 lakh litres of safe, affordable water every month to residents of 40 slums in Bhubaneswar. But in a city which has 400 plus slums and where the total demand for water is estimated to hit 143 million litres a day in 2019, can this really be a significant game-changer?

Bhubaneswar was not just the government’s first choice for its Smart Cities Mission, but has also featured in the list of top 20 global smart cities. But it has seen a number of setbacks recently. On safety, health, mobility, employment, how ‘smart’ is Bhubaneswar?

Indian city roads witness a David-Goliath tussle everyday between cycles and motorised transport. And the latter still holds a big advantage. As more and more cities formally launch bike sharing programmes, will the commoner take to cycling in a big way, given the safety concerns?

As in many other cities in India, extreme weather events such as heavy rainfall and intolerable temperatures are becoming an annual event in Bhubaneswar too. One can no longer ignore the urgent need for climate-smart urban planning.

Most cities have suffered because of CEOs who keep changing or have additional responsibilities and charges that make it difficult to focus exclusively on the Smart City projects.