Chinese President Xi Jinping is planning big-ticket investment projects in India to counter Asian rival Japan’s $35-billion push to build smart cities1 and finance infrastructure projects over a period of five years.

On September 17, Xi will arrive in Ahmedabad for his maiden visit to India on the final leg of a three-nation South Asia tour.

The Chinese President’s entourage will have 100 top businessmen and industrialists. Beijing is understood to be keen on investing 100 billion dollars in the country in the next five years.

• 1. How about our cities and towns? We need foolproof garbage management, reduction in congestion and pollution, a good public transport system, fire safety in public buildings and so on. Instead of such basic and doable improvements, what are we promised? Smart cities! What is a smart city? South Korea's Songdo is a smart city. It is being built at a cost of $35 billion and is slated to have sensors and computers placed in every building and road, to automatically adjust energy consumption. When we cannot even sweep our roads regularly, we want to fix sensors and computers in all our buildings and roads! Will we be fixing computers and sensors in our slums as well, where people live in sub-Saharan conditions? Or will we be shipping all such eyesores out of site, like they did at the time of the Asian and Commonwealth games? In both the cases, hawkers, beggars and vagabonds were willy-nilly pushed into trucks and sent out of Delhi, with a strict warning not to come back till the event was over!!

  Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/visakhapatnam/Of-bullet-trains-and-smart-cities/articleshow/42509233.cms