By Our Correspondent
BHUBANESWAR:As many as 15 IAS officers of 2019 batch were on Saturday visited the office of Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited (BSCL) and the Bhubaneswar Operations Centre (BOC) in order to understand the functioning of the various Smart City Projects as part of their Winter Study Tour to the Housing and Urban Development (H&UD) Department of the Government of Odisha.
The trainee IAS officers also took stock of the projects under the public-private-partnership (PPP) model under the Smart City.During their visit senior officials of BSCL apprised them regarding the progress of the various projects undertaken by the special purpose vehicle.
The trainee IAS officers were briefed about area-based development or infrastructure projects, pan-city interventions under the information technology (IT) based Smart Solutions and “Socially Smart Bhubaneswar” project by General Manager Administration Kamaljit Das.Chief Finance Officer Manoranjan Samantray, GM Engineering Ashwini Kumar Biswal and Company Secretary Ajaya Kumar Majhi were also present.
The trainee IAS officers took keen interest and participated in the discussion process of Smart Traffic Management, Smart Traffic Management, Smart Parking, Smart Response, Smart Communication and Bhubaneswar Operations Centre, which is working as the temporary command and control centre for the city. They also asked many questions and enquired about the project components as well as how the citizens are being served through their implementation. They also visited and discussed about the functioning of the Bhubaneswar Operations Centre.
They were also briefed about how infrastructure projects like Smart Janpath, multi-level car parking, integrated public service centre, social equity centre and how in various ways they would help citizens in future. The State-of-the-art multi-modal hub near the city railway station was also mentioned during the presentation.
“Socially Smart Bhubaneswar”, a collaborative initiative of BSCL, Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation and United Nations Population Fund which was initiated in Jan 2017 in eight slums under Bhubaneswar Town Centre District (Smart District) and currently covering 100 slums of the city was also discussed in detailed and how it has helped the slum population was also deliberated.
The trainee IAS officers will visit the Bhubaneswar Development Authority tomorrow to understand various PPP projects undertaken by the development authority across the State Capital.
