Bengaluru: Urban Development Minister B A Basavaraj has said that he has already written to Union Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Singh Puri to include Mysuru, Ballari, Vijayapura, and Kalaburgi in the Smart City project.
Speaking to reporters after chairing a review meeting of all the seven smart cities and reviewing the progress of the works undertaken under Smart City Projects (SCP), Basavaraj said that he recently met Hardeep Singh Puri in Lucknow and requested him to include these cities in the project.
He said that after he took charge as Urban Development Minister, the work taken up under SCP was progressing at a good speed. By February 2020, development works worth Rs 855 crore had been undertaken, and projects worth Rs 2,456 crore had been undertaken in all seven smart cities since then, he said.
The Union Government has set a deadline of July 2023 to finish all the works undertaken under SCP, but the Urban Development department is aiming to finish all the works well before the deadline set by the Union Government, and all the SCP works in these cities will be completed by March 2023, he said.
The state is in the second spot in terms of inviting tenders for the work, and in the fourth position in terms of giving work orders for the works, he said and added that the SCP works project cost remained the same as all the works suffered due to COVID, lockdown, and worker shortages in the last two years. Due to these problems, the deadlines were revised and this time all the works would be completed within the new time frame, he said.
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