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Civic Initiative
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The EuroIndia Centre launched the Civic Initiative in 2006 at the behest of the Prime Minister of India and founding President Emeritus of the Centre, Dr Manmohan Singh.
His government had launched in the same year the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission to modernize the 63 largest cities of India, the first such programme since India’s independence. He then wished that the Centre could play its part in this ambitious programme: “This challenging mission [the N.U.R.M.] would be greatly facilitated if our cities could imbibe the wealth of experience and the state-of-the-art and know-how that European cities have developed over decades of being confronted to similar social and economic pressures.“
Click here for background note on the JNNURM
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That led the Centre to organize its first EuroIndia Forum in Goa in February 2007, followed by a second Forum in April 2008 and two missions of Indian cities to Europe.
Encouraged by this success, the Centre has since unveiled an ambitious 2008-11 F.L.Y. A. K.I.T.E. strategy to build a unique institutional exchange platform at local level, covering Knowledge, Investment, Tourism and urban Excellence (K.I.T.E.), to ensure sustainable win-win co-operations between Cities, Regions and States of Europe and India and their stakeholders: companies, academic and research institutes, NGO’s, etc. and to open broad channels of communication between their civil societies.
This ambitious strategy led to the success of the first-ever EuroIndia City Summit in Valladolid on 4-6 October 2009 followed by a powerful official Indian civic and corporate mission to Madrid and Paris, where it was received respectively by the Municipality of Madrid and in Paris by the National Agency for Urban Renovation and the Ministry of Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development and the Sea. |
We also broke new ground with our first EuroIndia Conference on 16 June in Paris, followed by a business breakfast, with one of our illustrious founding members, Deepak Parekh, Chairman of Housing Development Finance Corporation, as Guest Speaker.
Since, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation launched an other massive social housing scheme called Rajiv Awas Yojna that calls for the eradication of all slums in India in five years. Click here for presentation of Sustainable City Development in India: Leveraging Urban Legacy by Dr. P.K.Mohanty, leader of the Indian Delegation to Europe and Mission Director/Joint secretary JNNURM, Ministry of Housing & Urban Poverty alleviation
This cannot but add to the fast growing wave of re-urbanization in India and trigger India’s urban revolution that offer the Centre and its members a fantastic window of opportunity to play a key role as honest broker between India and Europe at the local level and bridge the existing knowledge and physical gap between the two sides.
We therefore plan to organize more such events and missions in India and in Europe in 2010 and consolidate our gains through an expansion of our presence in the Europe and India. For more details log on the 2010 Action Plan
European and Indian Cities wishing to engage with India or Europe are welcome to use the Centre as an intermediary to the hilt for their own sake and follow the edifying exemple of Ahmedabad and Valladolid that have reached a high level of co-operation in only two years after their first contact was brokered by the Centre at the 2nd Forum of Goa in April 2008. To read the Valladolid-Ahmedabad partnership case study in English, French or Spanish,
A pictorial account is also given on the dedicated page below:
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In hindsight, the key factors behind their remarkable achievements has been a strong vision at the top by both cities of the need to have a long term engagement with Europe/India for their own sake, a determined political will endorsed by the local polity at large to support it with sufficient means and an unflinching trust in the capacity of the Centre to play Euro-Indian broker and deliver on their high expectations.
Other equally promising partnerships that have been signed between members of the Centre are:
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