Meerut: The city’s chaotic traffic has at last attracted the much-awaited attention of the Meerut civic body, which is including transportation as one of the main areas of focus in its updated draft proposal for Smart City project to be submitted before the Centre.After not being selected as a Smart City in rounds 1 and 2, the Meerut Municipal Corporation (MMC) is hoping for a change of fortunes this time around.The updated version of the Smart City proposal has to be submitted to the Ministry of Urban Development by March 31. The MMC, in co-ordination with consulting firm Design Point Consult Limited, is working on the plan and is looking to focus on transportation, e-governance and economic development measures in Meerut’s proposal.“Our main focus is on three areas -- transportation, e-governance and economic development. Traffic is a major issue in Meerut city and it has grown fast in the past few years. We are looking to develop a city mobility plan that will ease the traffic problem and bring relief to residents,” said Moinuddin, executive engineer of MMC.“In the e-governance, we will give importance to e-redressal system, where people do not need to visit offices and their complaints can be registered online. We will develop a website portal for this. Then, we will also focus on economic development as Meerut is an industrial hub. We will focus on providing better infrastructure and a better ecosystem for industries to flourish,” he said.The Meerut Smart City proposal faced major disappointments in the last two rounds of selection, where it failed to make the cut. In the second round, when 27 cities were selected, not only did Meerut fail to make to the list, it was ranked 2nd from bottom in the ranking. The Smart City proposals for 40 cities in round 3 have to be submitted by March 31.The Centre had allocated a quota of 13 cities to UP under the project kicked off by the Centre in 2015. But the state government said it would send names of 14 cities so that both Meerut and Rae Bareli were included.The project took political overtones after the Centre objected to the UP government’s proposal asking why Rae Bareli, the parliamentary constituency of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, was given preference over Meerut, the parliamentary constituency of BJP MP Rajendra Agarwal.The state government, on the other hand, clubbed the two cities into one bracket while insisting that both Rae Bareli and Meerut were on equal footing.

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