Scheme for Selection Process

SCHEME FOR INDIA SMART CITIES CHALLENGE SELECTION PROCESS

This note outlines how the selection process for the India Smart Cities challenge will be structured and how the process will be transparent from start to finish. The Smart City Proposal (SCP) format has already been communicated to the shortlisted cities, including the evaluation criteria. The SCP format was prepared in close consultation with the States/Cities.

With regard to the selection process, Para 9.1.3 of the Smart City Mission guidelines states the following: “By a stipulated date, to be indicated by MoUD to the States/UTs, proposals will be submitted to MoUD for all these 100 cities. These will be evaluated by a Committee involving a panel of national and international experts, organizations and institutions. The winners of the first round of Challenge will be announced by MoUD.”In keeping with the guidelines, the Mission Directorate has prepared the following process flow to achieve the target of announcing the winners of the Smart City Challenge on 26th January 2016.

TIMELINE

1. The process of selection will be done during 15th Dec 2015 and 25 Jan 2016 and will consist of three parts –
   • Scanning of SCPs (e.g. collating papers, verifying the completeness of SCP, assigning a unique number), by Ministry of Urban Development – 15th Dec to 20 Dec 2015.
   • Evaluation of SCP by Indian and foreign experts – 20 Dec 2015 to 20 Jan 2016
   • Selection by the Apex Committee, Ministry of Urban Development – 20 Jan to 25 Jan 2016.

THREE-STEP PROCESS

1. Screening by Ministry of Urban development

• The MoUD will assemble the SCPs and other papers for use by the assessment experts. This will be a pre-scrutiny but will not influence the evaluation. The MIS data emerging from the pre-scrutiny will be provided to all evaluators.

2. Assessment by Expert Committee

• The Ministry of Urban Development nominates three local and well-reputed experts to lead three teams of evaluators who are high-level experts and are associated with credible and reputed institutions/organizations.
• The nomination of experts has been considered keeping in mind the following criteria:
  • Evaluation teams can command sufficient knowledge of the urban development sector in India
  • No team member has any conflict of interest with regard to any of the cities or states
  • Experts will maintain utmost confidentiality of the proposals they are evaluating 
• Under the supervision of the Mission Director and the assistance provided by the Team Administrators, the experts will be formed into three teams, ensuring that there is equal representation of domain expertise and mix of Indian and international expertise.
• Each team will assess the 98 SCPs independently and give scores to each question as per the Scoring Template provided to them.At the end of the evaluation period, the three teams of evaluators will meet together to decide on a consensus score for each city and a ranking of all the cities. If a consensus score cannot be agreed, then an average of each team’s score will beconsidered. The benchmark scores for final selection of Smart Cities will also be suggested by the teams to the Apex Committee.
• The Team Administrators will provide assistance to the teams, including ensuring that the scores are weighted according to the weights assigned by the Ministry of Urban Development’s scoring framework (30% for city-level criteria, 55% for area-based development, 15% for pan-city proposal etc.) Assistance will be given for weighting of scores, etc.

3. Review by Apex Committee

• The Apex Committee will review the evaluation done by the Panel of experts and approve the winning SCPs.In order to select the winning cities, the SCPs will be ranked on the scores awarded by the assessment panel and on agreed and previously communicated set of considerations (e.g., no more than two winning cities from each state, etc).
• Maximum number of winners – upto 20. Depending on the number of winners, some SCPs (20-30) may be enhanced from ‘Good to Great’.

POST-SELECTION

• The future course of action for the MoUDwill be determined by the outcomes of the Smart City Challenge; however, it is anticipated that next steps will include funding of SPVs in the winning cities, handholding of select proposals to make them ‘Good to Great’, conducting Round 2 of the smart city challenge, etc.
• A detailed stock-taking exercise will present an analysis of learning from the Smart City Challenge - Stage I & II; the potential for match-making between the cities and prospective bilateral and multilateral funders/investors; the strategic gains from executing the winning cities (such as meeting the commitments on climate change, successful intervention models that emerge from the proposals received from cities; etc.