About the grant, he said two installments were due from Central Government, for which the proposal is now dispatched. The condition from Government was that unless earlier funds were fully utilised, second installment cannot be released. Hence all the dues of suppliers and contractors were released that too in record time.

Since the funds meant for Smart City was lying unspent, the Board decided to divert the same for other intervention in city to achieve the goal, Gotmare revealed. The same had approval of NSSCDCL Chairperson Sanjay Mukherjee and the money is being utilised for buying new electric buses, to construct multi-layered parking lots and other modern amenities for second capital of the country.

Agreeing that the Smart City Project is still in its infancy, Got He said the focus in Smart City area is now going to be on smart intervention. This is quite an about turn from earlier stance when one composite tender was floated for rolling out civic amenities and laying optical fibre cable (OFC) in the entire 1700 acres area of Pardi-Bharatwada-Punapur. Said Gotmare further, now the project is going to be executed through microscopic planning, identifying the core sector that can be speedily developed on the Eastern periphery of city.

The plan when drawn-up was quite ambitious but one thing is to be remembered since it was a Brown Field project, the sailing was not going to be easy. Apart from executing the mega project, more challenging was bringing people on board as there was always going to view it with suspicion, though in long run all stakeholders stands to benefit. No doubt the expanse of project wherein area based development (ABD) was planned for 1700 acres area was quite huge, now looking back clearly more problems would arise during regularisation of the existing layouts as per approved Town Planning Scheme. The houses in the unauthorised layouts that have come-up in haphazard manner. At many places the road connectivity is also not properly marked out on the maps and it's going to quite a challenge for us to find a way out of the mess.

Against this background Gotmare said that the 60:40 ratio for Area Based Development (ABD) through land pooling was the best way forward. "Yes comparison can be made with other Government projects, for example Samruddhi Expressway, but compared to those land owners in Smart City would be getting developed area unlike the farmers who got hefty compensation in lieu of their land." Citing an example, as the officials have now targeted construction of police station and a fire brigade station the ground difficulties are arising. As to police station the proposal is being reworked since we realised that if the building is constructed it would block the access to people residing in its viccinity. So were back to drawing board to realign the project and chart out a win-win situation for all. “Now we at Smart city has decided to go in for smaller components with primary focus on completing the road connectivity of the identified area with Pardi road,” Gotmare elaborated further during the talk. He said two major road stretches, Kalamna-Bharatwada and Pardi-Punapur are going to be taken-up as same is crucial for connectivity in the area. Once the road connectivity gets going the results are going to be visible in time to come and there is belief in Smart City project would take concrete shape, said Gotmare.