TenderSURE roads implemented in Bengaluru may soon find their way in several Smart Cities across the country. Senior Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) officials told The Hindu that their counterparts in several cities, including Nagpur, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Indore and Vadodara, which have been chosen for the Smart City project, had visited Bengaluru several times to learn more about TenderSURE roads.
Smart City guidelines include specifications of TenderSURE roads, which will be called Smart Roads. The salient features of TenderSURE that have been incorporated include pedestrian-friendly footpaths, uniform carriageway and utility ducts on either side of the road.
“It is not just officials from cities across the country, even those from Davangere, Tumakuru, Hubballi-Dharwad, Shivamogga, Belagavi and Mangaluru have visited Bengaluru to understand the intricacies of the design,” said a civic official.
The official added that the 12 TenderSURE roads in the city were laid at a cost of ₹10 crore per kilometre. The estimate for the Smart Roads is between ₹12 crore and ₹15 crore per kilometre.
Kshitij Urs from the Forum for Urban Governance and Commons, a network of citizens, however, spoke against adoption of TenderSURE specifications in the Smart City project. He said that the culture of the city does not get reflected in the design. That apart, the cost of building them is nearly seven times that of a conventional road.
He argued that the design is not environmentally sustainable, as it does not provide any opportunity to plant trees or allow water to seep through the footpath. “It is an extremely regressive model that makes Smart Cities creditworthy but not sovereign and democratic. This is the standardisation of an economic ideology that is neo-liberal in nature where decision-making is centralised and debt is decentralised,” he said.
Paper in Australian journal
A city-based researcher has published a paper in an Australian journal dedicated to transport and vehicle engineering on TenderSURE roads and how they have improved pedestrian facilities in Bengaluru, with inputs from some others.
The paper is titled ‘Improvement to Pedestrian Walkway Facilities to Enhance Pedestrian Safety - Initiatives in India’. It is authored by Reshma P.S., assistant professor, Global Academy of Technology; A. Veeraragavan from the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras; Swathi Ramanathan, chairperson, JANA Urban Space Foundation; and BBMP officials K.R. Nagaraj and Basavaraj Kabade.