1 week ago
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With the Puducherry authorities ordering the winding up of Puducherry Smart City Development Limited (PSCDL) – the Special Purpose Vehicle of the Smart City Mission – signaling the closure of the decade-long programme, determination has been a renewed request to repurpose the SPV to leverage its organization capableness for semipermanent municipality transformation.
Sources said the authorities had ordered the fiscal closure of PSCDL arsenic of March 31, 2026. A full of 82 projects were sanctioned nether the mission, of which 81 person been completed truthful far.
The operation of the Road Over Bridge astatine the level crossing adjacent AFT mills connected the Cuddalore Road is the lone pending project. The enactment started successful July 2025 and is nether way. Of the full task outgo of ₹72 crore, PSCDL has transferred its full stock of ₹52 crore to the Southern Railway.
The winding up of PSCDL is nether mode and the Smart City assets volition beryllium transferred to the Local Administration Department. The existing unit person besides been repatriated, with their responsibilities redistributed among their genitor departments.
Role of the SPV
The SPV has cultivated a robust organization capableness to negociate high-value municipality projects wrong abbreviated timelines portion besides contributing to the emergence of a skilled municipality absorption workforce. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has issued an advisory to repurpose the SPV.
According to a elder official, “Recognising the strategical investments made successful establishing and strengthening the SPV and their relevance successful supporting municipality section bodies to code analyzable and evolving municipality challenges, the Puducherry authorities should guarantee that the SPV continues to run beyond the completion of the deadline.”
He added, “In enactment with the directions of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, respective States are present converting Smart City SPVs into consultancy and implementation agencies for aboriginal municipality missions. While the nationalist argumentation absorption encourages retention and repurposing of SPVs, Puducherry appears to beryllium moving towards winding down the full operational ecosystem of PSCDL. This would beryllium a large organization loss.”
According to a erstwhile authoritative of PSCDL, “Puducherry is simply a tiny UT and has comparatively fewer professionally structured municipality task absorption bodies susceptible of handling complex, externally funded infrastructure projects. Over the past fewer years, PSCDL has created a trained manpower ecosystem with organization representation and operational experience. Dissolving this operation instantly aft the ngo closure would effect successful nonaccomplishment of trained quality resources and nonaccomplishment of municipality readying continuity, thereby weakening aboriginal task execution capacity.”
Official sources pointed retired that adjacent aft the closure of the Smart Cities Mission, Puducherry continues to look tremendous municipality challenges vis a vis coastal resilience and clime adaption, stormwater management, sewerage modernisation, practice municipality conservation, municipality mobility, astute parking, tourism infrastructure, flood mitigation, municipality housing, and catastrophe resilience.
Many projects successful the pipeline necessitate coordination with agencies specified arsenic World Bank, and a nonrecreational retained SPV could go Puducherry’s dedicated municipality translation bureau susceptible of implementing specified projects efficiently. The caller authorities should instrumentality a semipermanent presumption alternatively of treating PSCDL simply arsenic a mission-specific impermanent entity.
