India and US lay road to three smart cities

India and the United States will set up a task force for jointly developing Allahabad, Ajmer and Vishakhapatnam as smart cities and have set a threemonth deadline for preparing the road map.

The decision was taken at a meeting between urban development minister M Venkaiah Naidu and US secretary of commerce Penny Pritzker in the national capital, two days after agreements were signed for development of the three cities with the assistance of the United States Trade and Development Agency.

The task force will comprise officials from the Centre, state governments concerned and the USTDA. "The road map will be worked out in three months," Naidu said on Tuesday.

A Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion official said that top US companies, including Cisco, Honeywell and IBM, have formed a consortium to assist the projects.

The initiative was conceived during the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the US last September, when the issue was mentioned in the Joint Statement.

Naidu said, "It is now time for both the sides to walk the talk by acting quick and concretising the agreements reached." Contending that the initiative has raised hopes about smart cities becoming a reality, the minister said that Obama's visit to India has even furthered these expectations.

Pritzker also met commerce and industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman during the day. "Senior Indian and US officials will meet after the forthcoming Budget Session to identify and prioritise sectors for investment and technology sharing", Sitharaman said after the 40-minute meeting.

Issues related to the Totalisation Agreement, intellectual property rights (IPRs) and visa also come up for discussion. Sitharaman invited comments from the US on the draft IPR policy, which was prepared by a six-member think tank. "We invited the Americans to have a look at the policy and invited inputs from them on the draft policy," she added.

The US companies have alleged that India's IPR regime is discriminatory, particularly for the pharmaceutical industry.

But India has consistently maintained that its laws are compliant with global and World Trade Organization (WTO) norms.

The Indian side also highlighted the recent policy decisions such as hiking the foreign direct investment limit in insurance and defence sectors, where American companies can invest.

"We have asked for possibilities where technology could be shared too and also to bring in investment to help small and medium enterprises of India," Sitharaman said.