Nurturing Neighbourhoods Challenge

January 18, 2022

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Recently, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), announced ten winning cities for the Nurturing Neighbourhoods Challenge.
- At the event, the Ministry also launched Season-2 of India Cycles4Change and Streets for People Challenges and a book titled ‘Nurturing Neighburhoods Challenge: Stories from the Field”.

About

The winning cities are Bengaluru, Hubballi-Dharwad, Indore, Jabalpur, Kakinada, Kochi, Kohima, Rourkela, Vadodara, and Warangal.
- Finalists were selected following a comprehensive evaluation by a jury of representatives from MoHUA, BvLF, and independent experts in the fields of urban design, early childhood development, and behavioural change.

About Nurturing Neighbourhoods Challenge

It was launched in the first week of November 2020.
It is a 3-year initiative hosted by the Smart Cities Mission, MoHUA in collaboration with the Bernard van Leer Foundation and World Resources Institute (WRI) India.
The Challenge enables Indian cities to adopt an early childhood lens in designing neighbourhood-level improvements that promote the health and well-being of young children and their caregivers.
Features
- Through the Challenge, selected cities will receive technical assistance and capacity-building to improve public spaces, mobility, neighbourhood planning, early childhood services and data management.

Significance

It aims to address the need for early childhood amenities in government office premises, bus shelters and transit hubs.
The Challenge has refocused attention on the importance of neighbourhood-level interventions.
It is well-aligned with the strategy of the Smart Cities Mission to promote inclusive, people-oriented development in compact, local areas towards scaling city-wide solutions that enhance our citizens’ quality of life.
It enables Indian cities to adopt an early childhood lens in designing neighbourhood-level improvements that promote the health and well-being of young children and their caregivers.

Achievements

Under the Nurturing Neighbourhoods Challenge pilot stage, i.e. stage 1, in 7 months, the pioneering cohort of 25 cities has-
- Implemented over 70 pilot projects in neighbourhoods across India.
- These diverse projects ranged from creation of public spaces in slums, age-appropriate play areas, enhanced outdoor waiting spaces around primary health centres and anganwadis, amenities for caregivers, such as public toilets and nursing cabins, improved streets and junctions, and reclaiming underutilized and residual spaces to create parks and gardens.
  - These projects benefitted over 1 lakh children between the ages of 0-5 and more than 1 million people.

Smart City Mission

It was launched by the Hon’ Prime Minister on 25 June, 2015.
The main objective of the Mission is to promote cities that provide core infrastructure, clean and sustainable environment and give a decent quality of life to their citizens through the application of ‘smart solutions’.
The Mission aims to drive economic growth and improve quality of life through comprehensive work on social, economic, physical and institutional pillars of the city.
The focus is on sustainable and inclusive development by creation of replicable models which act as lighthouses to other aspiring cities.
100 cities have been selected to be developed as Smart Cities through a two-stage competition.
The Mission is operated as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme.
There is no standard definition or template of a smart city. In the context of our country, the six fundamental principles on which the concept of Smart Cities is based are:

The Streets for People Challenge

The Streets for People Challenge, launched in the first week of November 2020.
It is an initiative to inspire cities to create walking-friendly streets through quick measures, in response to COVID-19.
The Challenge will support cities across the country to develop a unified vision of streets for people in consultation with stakeholders and citizens.

Source: PIB