The Chinese government has extensively utilized Singapore’s skills in such urban planning. In the mid-nineties, it created a model business park-cum-city in a joint venture with Singapore at Suzhou, which became the model for new business parks around China. Thereafter, JVs were created via Singbridge (a consortium of major Singaporean companies) for an Eco-city in Tianjin and Knowledge City in Guangzhou. All of these are examples of smart cities created as satellite towns in highly urbanized environments with sustainability being the principle driver and ability to create employment at the same time. In India, a Singapore government company, Ascendas, has been at the forefront of creating state of the art IT and business parks which have been role models for such facilities in India since the mid-nineties. This experience should be leveraged further in India.

One way to fast track planning and construction of such smart cities is to include the private sector in India within a given framework for such new townships by the government. This would need to be specific to the creation of such smart cities in designated areas, so that existing and outdated laws do not become a barrier. These activities would need to be undertaken by approved consortia (consisting of experts in smart city planning/consulting groups/infrastructure and urban developers/IT experts), which would assist in conceptualizing, designing world class smart city clusters. Such consortia with well-known Singaporean partners with proven expertise in smart city planning and development, would bring the latest techniques and would additionally project manage the construction of such smart cities via well-known developers. Creating such consortia is a prerequisite to planning and project managing the creation of such world class sustainable townships. Using Singapore based urban planning groups is recommended given their experience in Asia and its closeness to India.

India is going down the path to manage its urbanization better via the creation of 100 smart cities. Singapore with its closeness to India and with relevant skills and experience in creation of smart and liveable cities in Asia is ideally positioned. What it needs to do is to boldly seize the moment.