‘Smart city’ buzz spurs GTU to flag 3 e-courses for babus, consultants

The state varsity will look to harness many of ‘smart features’ of Ahmedabad started by its civic body and those of Surat and Rajkot – like GIFT city, slum upgradation project, retrofitting of heritage monuments, heritage mapping and conservation efforts, town planning (TP) schemes, mobile and e-governance initiatives and a heritage cell as part of the AMC.

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“We are looking at attracting officials from other states with similar training modules where the focus will be on Smart Cities & Urban Development, Amrut cities as Ahmedabad and other cities of Gujarat have several examples where a few of the features of smart cities exist and can be great exposure for other states to emulate. With the government having approved 100 smart cities, we will take participants through making a proposal, resource analysis of each city, policy discussion especially for government officers and also for consultants in the process of making smart city proposals as a 90 day time period has been given by the Government before cities can submit their proposals,” said GTU Deputy Director Naresh Jadeja.

GTU is also in the process of inking an MoU with the Regional Centre for Urban and Environmental Studies at Lucknow who coordinated the delegation from UP which mentors 16 states through four centers to conduct training and seminars for government officials from these states. Earlier this month GSSCD hosted a 3-day training workshop on smart cities development for a 35-member delegation including 13 municipal commissioner of all big cities of Uttar Pradesh.

“We are looking to flag off three e-courses on ‘Smart city development’, ‘Smart Waste Management’ and ‘Project management for smart cities’ from the 28th of September. The certificate e-course on ‘Smart cities planning and Development’ will have a course fee of Rs 12,000 and will be a 16-week course from October to January constituting 9 modules with a batch size of 30 students. We plan to start this course first and based on the feedback the other two are in pipeline. We are opening up the course to foreign students as well. We will host the e-course through a new open source platform through which we can have interactions, assignments, student submissions, online assignments among others things,” Jadeja added.

Varsity officials added that the GSSCD may even be hosted at an upcoming ‘PG research centre’ which may come up on Chandkheda campus soon that will be completely dedicated to research activities. GTU currently has close to 500 plus colleges affiliated to it across the state that offer courses in the basic five disciplines of MBA, MCA, pharmacy, engineering and architecture.