India designates 12 new smart industrial cities – to take total to 2

The Indian government is to build a total of 12 new industrial smart cities in various states to drive domestic manufacturing in the country. These join eight urban manufacturing centres that are already under development. The department of industry and trade revealed progress with the initial developments, mostly about allocation of land and deployment of higher-order trunk infrastructure, and also details about some of the new catchments. Two new industrial cities will be developed in Andhra Pradesh in the south and Bihar in the east, next to Nepal.

Rajesh Kumar Singh, secretary for the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), was quoted variously, apparently based on an initial report (requires subsription) in the Press Trust of India (PTI), that all the new industrial cities will follow the model the government created in Greater Noida and Dholera, started in 2021/22, which took an existing small-town semi-rural development scheme to transform villages in India with higher-grade sanitation, transportation, and connectivity infrastructure into a broader urban industrial smart city project.

As it stands, India has eight industrial cities under construction. Kumar Singh told PTI that large-scale infrastructure to support the developments has been deployed already in Dholera in Gujarat, Auric in Maharashtra), Vikram Udyogpuri in Madhya Pradesh, and Krishnapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. Land allotment for industries is underway in these locations, apparently. The other four industrial cities, designated prior to the new budget earlier this month, are at an earlier stage; the government’s special purpose vehicle (SPV) is putting down roads, networks, water, and power.

The move is to boost domestic manufacturing, including with new IoT and AI-related automation technologies, and to create jobs and drive the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). Kumar Singh said: “These are industrial smart cities. These 12 new cities will make the count to 20. We built the trunk infrastructure and then gave the plots. We take environmental clearance for the entire city, so the company gets the ‘plug-and-play’ kind of things… We just have to approve the equity to the SPV.”