Response poor, LMC adds a website for inputs

Lucknow: Lucknow citizens have still not shown any enthusiasm for the Smart City project. So far, Lucknow Municipal Corporation has received just 15,000 online and offline suggestions on making Lucknow a Smart City, only 3,000 more than the first round. This is abysmally behind the LMC target of obtaining six lakh suggestions.

Though the last date to submit the upgraded proposal is April 15, the window in the official website of government of India for public suggestions will close on March 31. Hence, the LMC has decided to bring in a separate website where people can post their suggestions till April 15 so that citizen participation could be improved. A questionnaire system is also being introduced to collect suggestions on different proposals.

After the Central government's Smart City committee pointed out lack of citizen participation as one of the biggest hurdles in Lucknow getting through the first list of smart cities, LMC, on March 15, decided to seek suggestions from at least 20% of the city's population, i.e; 6 lakh. However, so far, they have managed to evoke 14,321 online and 500 offline suggestions.

Additional municipal commissioner PK Srivastava said, "We have got 5,500 forms filled and 12,000 more, with questions about what locals want, are to be distributed. We are successfully using social media too. Over 6,36,439 people in the city on Facebook have viewed the profile and 26,295 people have liked it. Over 3,000 people follow us on twitter, 5,000 on Google plus and 3,000 are associated on Linkdein, plus we have 1,000 instagram followers too.

Meanwhile, a group of citizens led by Shashank Sharma formed 'Green Lucknow' organization and submitted suggestions under 'offline citizen engagement' category.