National Urban Digital Mission

India has been the fastest growing major economy in the world, with an average growth of 7% from 2017-18 to 2018-19, and a consistently increasing share in the world’s GDP.

As per the Ministry of Finance, India aspires to become a USD 5-trillion economy by 2024 and a USD 10-trillion economy by 2030.

There are over 4,400 statutory towns and cities in India with around 40 crores inhabitants. At the current rate of growth, urban population in India is estimated to reach a staggering 60 crores by 2030 (WUP, 2018). According to Census 2011, as many as 53 cities in India had a million plus population. It is projected that more than 50% of the country’s population will be urban by 2050 (WUP, 2018).

The National Urban Digital Mission (NUDM) was launched by Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs in February 2021, to facilitate electronic delivery of municipal services to citizens across towns and cities of the country.

Urban Challenge

The hypothesis that urbanization is necessarily beneficial for economic growth cannot be taken for granted. Our cities have to overcome a number of challenges in order to realize their potential as engines of growth. At present, 34% of India’s population lives in urban areas, with a growth rate of 2.4% in the 2010-18 period (World Urbanization Prospects, WUP, 2018). As per 2011 census, Tamil Nadu (48.4%) was the most urbanized among major states, followed by Kerala (47.7%), Maharashtra (45.2%) and Gujarat (42.6%). These four states together contributed to around one-third of the total urban population of India in 2011. States with low levels of urbanization were Himachal Pradesh (10%), Bihar (11.3%), Assam (14%), and Odisha (16.7%). 70 percent of the urban population is concentrated in close to 12% of its cities.

What is NUDM

National Urban Digital Mission aims to build the shared digital infrastructure that will strengthen the capacity of the urban ecosystem to solve complex problems at scale and speed.  It is built as a public good and provides the ecosystem actors the foundational digital building blocks, ready-to-use platforms, standards, specifications, and frameworks.

Vision

To improve the ease of living for citizens by creating a national urban digital ecosystem that delivers accessible, inclusive, efficient and citizen centric governance in India’s 4400 towns and cities.

Objectives

To enhance the ease of living in our cities and towns leveraging IT & associated technologies and support the existing urban ecosystem systems in a ‘citizen-centric’ approach, the NUDM envisages the following specific objectives:

• To create shared digital infra as a public good in the shape of state-of-the-art digital urban platforms, building blocks, data infra to manage the core digital urban data, and the infrastructure required for its seamless exchange;
• To catalyse an urban national open digital ecosystem (u-NODE) that leverages NUDM build new platforms, solutions and innovations
• To create open standards and enforce the adoption of open standards by all national digital urban stakeholders;
• To establish registries at appropriate levels to a create single source of truth in respect of urban assets, service delivery, urban data and actors
• To promote the development of nationally scalable application systems with a special focus on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals for urban;
• To adopt the best principles of cooperative federalism while working with the States,Union Territories & ULBs for the realization of the vision;
• To provide for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of governance at all levels; and To strengthen existing urban systems and applications, by ensuring their conformity with the defined standards and integration with the proposed NUDM.

The current strong public digital infrastructure - including that related to Aadhaar, Unified Payments Interface and wide reach of the Internet and mobile phones (JAM trinity) - provides a strong platform for establishing the building blocks of NUDM.

Approach

NUDM will be rolled out across three key pillars

• People: Mobilise, enable and empower stakeholders across the urban ecosystem
• Processes: Improve governance through standards and frameworks for collaboration and impact
• Platforms: Leverage technology in service of an improved quality of life for every citizen

Benefits

NUDM is designed to respond to the local challenges of the cities and to address citizen needs, such as:

• Improved ease of living for citizens through hassle-free access to government services
• Ease of working for field-level functionaries through digital tools and on demand capacity building
• Better decision support systems to manage cities better
• Easier access to information and a streamlined way of connecting with urban departments to serve citizens better
• Lowered costs for innovation through open data and ease of building solutions that suit the needs of stakeholders
• Improved ease of doing business through streamlined and time-bound approval of applications
• Reduced barriers to entry for startups and MSMEs to participate in urban development.
• Connecting evidence to policy and practice to enhance inclusive and sustainable urban development
• Drive reforms and achieve State priorities in a targeted manner Improved financial management, fund-utilization and budgeting
• Improved targeting of policy through analysing robust data on the urban sector across the country
• Foster national collaboration & competition for improved implementation of urban programs

Source : NUDM