Indore municipality bags first position in Janaagraha Awards

NEW DELHI: The second edition of the Janaagraha City Governance Awards was virtually held on January 12, 2021, and was presided over by Hardeep Singh Puri, Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India. Of the five categories, Odisha won two awards for Best State and Best Civic Agency. Gujarat and Kerala bagged the award for Best State Election Commission and Best State Finance Commission respectively. Indore was declared the Best Municipality from among all the nominations filed for the awards.

Indore won the award for its Public Private Partnership-based solid waste management, which was introduced under the Smart City Mission. Thiruvananthapuram emerged as first runner up in this category for its initiative named, ‘My City Beautiful City.’ As part of this initiative, the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation collected broken glasses and useless tyres from across the city with the aim of raising awareness on waste management, and simultaneously implement measures to make the capital city of Kerala clean and beautiful.

Raipur Municipal Corporation secured the second runner up position in the same category for introducing GIS (Geographic Information System) based property tax administration system, which is a set of computerised tools for collecting, storing, retrieving, transforming, and displaying spatial data. The city administration will use the generated data in property tax assessment and building permission.

The winners were chosen by a distinguished jury comprising of Amitabh Kant, NITI Aayog; Yamini Aiyer, Centre for Policy Research; Sanjeev Chopra, Director, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration; Ashutosh Varshney, Brown University; Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, Economist, IDFC Institute; and S K Das, Janaagraha’s Governing Board. The jury chaired by SK Das provided honourable mention to Kollam, Vellore, and Petlad municipal corporations in the ceremony. Vellore and Petlad have been working on decentralised solid waste management, and Kollam was applauded for its Zero-waste initiative.