The Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday approved the City Investments to Innovate, Integrate and Sustain 2.0 (CITIIS 2.0), a programme linked to Smart Cities and conceived by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) in partnership with foreign agencies.

This was announced by Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur after the Cabinet meeting.

The foreign agencies involved in the programme will be the French Development Agency (AFD); Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW), the German state-owned investment and development bank; the European Union (EU), besides the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA). The programme will run for a period of four years, from 2023 till 2027.

The programme envisages to support competitively selected projects promoting circular economy with focus on integrated waste management at the city level, climate-oriented reform actions at the State level, and institutional strengthening and knowledge dissemination at the national level.

The funding for the programme would include a loan of Rs 1760 crore (EUR 200 million) from AFD and KfW (EUR 100 million each) and a technical assistance grant of Rs 106 cr. (EUR 12 million) from the EU.

CITIIS 2.0 aims to leverage and scale up the learnings and successes of CITIIS 1.0. CITIIS 1.0 was launched jointly in 2018 by MoHUA, AFD, EU, and NIUA, with a total outlay of Rs 933 crore (EUR 106 million). It is running in 12 cities with projects for smart schools, green mobility corridors and bio-diversity parks.

Following the CITIIS 1.0 model, the CITIIS 2.0 has three major components for making cities healthy and beautiful, with an expenditure of Rs 1866 crore in 18 cities in the first component. Financial and technical support will be given in this part for developing projects focused on building climate resilience, adaptation and mitigation through competitively selected projects.

In the second part, all States and UTs will be eligible for support on demand basis. The States will be provided support to set-up/strengthen their existing State climate centres/Climate cells/ equivalents, create State and city level Climate Data Observatories, facilitate climate-data driven planning, develop climate action plans and build capacities of municipal functionaries.

In the third component, there will be interventions at all three levels; Centre, State and City to further climate governance in urban India through institutional strengthening.

The programme will supplement climate actions of the Government of India through its ongoing National programs (National Mission on Sustainable Habitat, AMRUT 2.0, Swachh Bharat Mission 2.0 and Smart Cities Mission), as well as contributing positively to India’s Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) and Conference of the Parties (COP26) commitments.