“National Urban Digital Mission (NUDM)” and other governance initiatives

What is the News?

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has launched the National Urban Digital Mission(NUDM) and several other initiatives for transforming urban governance.

National Urban Digital Mission(NUDM):

• Launched by: It has been launched by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA). In partnership with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY).
• Aim: To build the shared digital infrastructure that will strengthen the capacity of the urban ecosystem to solve complex problems.
• Approach: The digital infrastructure will be built across three pillars of People, Process and platform. The infrastructure will provide holistic support to cities and towns.
• Target: The NUDM aims to institutionalise a citizen-centric and ecosystem-driven approach to urban governance and service delivery. The NUDM will be completed in 2022 cities by 2022. Further, it will be expanded across all cities and towns in India by 2024.
• Significance:
  • The digital infrastructure will help cities to consolidate and cross-leverage the various digital initiatives of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.
  • It will also enable the cities and towns to benefit from holistic and diverse forms of support. Such as satisfying the needs and local challenges of the towns and cities.

India Urban Data Exchange (IUDX)

• Developed by: It has been developed in partnership between the Smart Cities Mission and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
• Purpose: It is designed to address the problem of data silos both within and across cities. It will address the data silos by providing a seamless interface for data providers and data users including Urban local bodies(ULBs). They can share, request and access datasets related to cities, urban governance and urban service delivery seamlessly.
  What is a data silo?
  A data silo is a group of raw data that is accessible by one department but isolated from the rest of the organization. This results in a severe lack of transparency, efficiency, and trust within that organization.

Read about Climate-Smart Cities Assessment Framework(CSCAF) 
SmartCode Platform:

• What is it? It is a platform that enables all ecosystem stakeholders to contribute to a repository of open-source codes. This repository will be used in providing various solutions and applications for urban governance.
• Purpose: It is designed to address urban challenges that ULBs face in the development and deployment of digital applications.
• How does it help? Since the existing codes available, the ULBs will customise them to suit local needs. So the ULBs don’t have to develop new solutions from scratch.
• The smart codes will be free and without any licensing or subscription fees. This will reduce the costs of building a locally-relevant solution. Because the cost is involved only in customising the code and developing a solution. Not for developing the code from scratch.

Read about Nurturing Neighbourhoods Challenge

Other Urban Governance Initiatives

 Climate Centre for Cities(C3):

• It has been launched by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs within the National Institute of Urban Affairs.
• It has been set up to consolidate and institutionalize and mainstream the learnings from experiences in our cities on climate change.

City Finance Portal:

• It is a single platform to enable sharing and learning of best practices and to help ULBs in accessing market funds.

Cycles4Change Challenge

 Source: PIB

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