Initiatives for Cities: MoHUA

• 05 Nov 2020

Why in News

Recently, the Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs has launched three initiatives, namely,

• The Nurturing Neighborhoods Challenge that focuses on shaping cities for young children and their families.
• The Data Maturity Assessment Framework - Cycle 2 to evaluate data ecosystems of cities.
• An on-line training programme for City Data Officers (CDOs) of 100 Smart Cities.

Key Points

• Nurturing Neighborhoods Challenge:
  
  • It is a three-year initiative that will support cities to develop, pilot, and scale solutions that enhance the quality of life of young children, their caregivers and families in the public realm.
  • It will be open to all smart cities, other cities with more than 5,00,000 population, and capitals of states and Union territories.
  • Cities will receive technical assistance and help in capacity-building to re-imagine parks and open spaces, improve access to early childhood facilities, adapt public spaces with early childhood-oriented amenities, and create accessible, safe, walkable streets for young children and families.
• Data Maturity Assessment Framework - Cycle 2:
  
  • Background:
    
    • The Smart Cities Mission launched the DataSmart Cities Strategy in February 2019, as a roadmap for harnessing the potential of data to address complex urban challenges across 100 Cities.
    • To successfully implement this initiative, the Data Maturity Assessment Framework was also launched to encourage cities to strengthen their data infrastructure and facilitate them in assessing their readiness and maturity on data.
  • DMAF -Cycle 2: It will support cities in the creation of 'culture of data’.
    
    • The core objective of this framework is to enable cities to assess their own data maturity with respect to a standardized framework covering aspects of enabling policies, governance structures, data management, capacity building, and stakeholder engagement at the city level.
    • This is expected to play an enabling role in democratizing the data culture for open- innovation, collaboration, co-creation and academic research.
    • The assessment for this cycle has been expanded to include cities other than Smart Cities.
    • It is in line with the Digital India Campaign which ensures that the government's services are made available to citizens more efficiently by leveraging data and digital technologies.
  • Data Maturity: It is the extent to which an organisation utilises the data they produce.
• On-line Training Programme for City Data Officers:
  
  • Specially designed for CDOs appointed in the 100 Smart Cities, it is a practice-based digital course that will expose CDOs to basic and advanced tools for data collection, analysis and visualization.
• Other Recent Initiatives:
  
  • Climate Smart Cities Assessment Framework (CSCAF) 2.0, along with the ‘Streets for People Challenge’
  • India Cycles4Change Challenge

Source: PIB