City Connect - CII

Urban management issues are increasingly becoming important to sustaining the economic activity in the country and widely affect the quality of life of urban citizens. In most of the rapidly growing Indian cities, it is well-known that urban stakeholders have been extremely frustrated by the challenges that the city faces on its infrastructure. This cuts across all categories of stakeholders – residents of the city, employers across the entire range of industries, small and medium firms, bodies like Rotary, industry associations, NGOs and community organizations.

These groups of institutions and individuals have demonstrated a clear commitment to the city over several years. Collectively, they also have the technical capacity and commitment to ensure that various government initiatives are successful. The challenge is to be able to harness these collective energies onto a single platform that can make the whole larger than the sum of the parts.

A workshop of corporate leaders and thought leaders in strategic, business and urban issues was organized on Jan 5-6, 2007 in Bangalore to explore new ways for the corporate sector to engage with urban governance. More than 40 leading CEOs participated at this Urban Conclave. One of the outcomes of these deliberations was the idea of setting up City Connect as a network of multiple stakeholders external to the government in order to constructively engage with government on city’s planning and implementation process. This also helps government respond in a constructive, collaborative manner to the voices coming from outside government, and create value-added partnerships.

Bangalore City Connect was the first of the City Connect chapters to be established in August 2007 as a registered trust with Confederation of Indian Industry (Karnataka and Bangalore chapters) and Janaagraha as its founding members. This body has been endorsed by several of the prominent industry associations and citizen groups in Bangalore. Traffic and Transportation has been identified as the focus area of Bangalore City Connect. Some of the projects that have been taken up include Connectivity to Bangalore’s new international airport (BIAL), Re-design of traffic junctions to reduce traffic congestion, Study on traffic warden requirements for busy corridors etc. Subsequently, Janaagraha (Chennai) and CII (Tamil Nadu) have setup up Chennai City Connect for various stakeholders of Chennai to interact and support the Government of Tamil Nadu for improvement of urban infrastructure.

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