Bridge – A participatory platform facilitating urban resilience by Urban Settlers

Interesting proposal! Indian cities could definitely use such a platform. I would like to further see how you scale this to a wider range of cities. Also, how do you plan to identify the key city experts? Thank you.

Thank you for your comments. Kindly find our reply below. ICLEI South Asia and similar organizations have vast outreach in Indian cities. Therefore allocating the management of the portal to these bodies will ensure its sustainability. Further, involvement of MoUD will ensure participation from cities to a certain extent. It is important that there is extensive hand holding for cities in the pilot phase, as success in this phase will help in bringing other cities on board. After the pilot phase, advertising and marketing of the portal will be a critical component. Social media can provide significant support for this. Further conferences such as the Mayors’ conference, Sustainable Cities conference, Delhi Sustainable Development Summit and so on can help in showcasing the success story of pilot phase to other cities. Apart from this investment in extensive communication will be helpful. In order to ensure financial feasibility of the portal beyond the pilot phase, MoUD can leverage the requirements of The Companys Bill 2013 of India. The bill requires companies to devote 2 percent of their net profits to CSR every year. Environmental sustainability is one of the core areas to be addressed under the bill. This creates a remarkable opportunity to have access to funds for urban adaptation. MoUD can facilitate the conversation between the companies and the managing body to ensure availability of funds for further roll out. This cost will involve the fee of the managing body and the additional costs for the participating cities.

A good idea. We are still not 100% clear it would be financially sustainable. Beyond the development phase, how do the creators imagine this would be funded? We wish this particular proposal was more explicit in including more than just city officials by inviting practitioners.Beyond generic "sharing", how will themes of work be organized in the forum? Or will theme evolve based on user contributions?

Hi Urnab settlers Team and friends, kindly consider to vote for my proposal shown in the link below https://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/1300206/planId/1002 Thanks in advance.

Hi, Thank you for your comments. Please find our reply below. We understand the concern about funding the proposal beyond the development stage. However, the Companys Bill of 2013 is an untapped source that can provide the requisite funding to the project if tapped into properly. Additionally, extensive use of social media platforms such as twitter, and other relevant social gatherings such as the Mayors’ conference and similar meetings focusing on cities will have to be targeted. Having a strong groundsel of marketing can also help in getting buy from other funding agencies. However, we still suggest The Companys Bill (private sector) to be the primary source of funding beyond the development phase. The proposal does include practitioners in addition to the city officials. It talks about including organizations with expertise in urban issues such as ARUP, TERI and TARU. Again, the logic behind the forum is to bring cities with similar issues together to mutually benefit from each other and to ensure that a larger number of cities can benefit from various pilot studies and projects being conducted in Indian cities. The ‘sharing’ refers to an open network of key online training programs, online tools that can benefit local governments, studies by key practitioners and more. The themes can potentially be as follows: A general profile for each city with its key officials having their profiles embedded within the city. Since most of the cities in India face issues with their basic infrastructure, it will be useful to have six major themes of water, sewerage and drainage, solid waste management, transportation, buildings, and biodiversity. Apart from these, a section of tools and techniques will be available. Key professionals, city advisory committee, and government officials will update these. Cities can upload information about the project they have conducted under each theme within their city profile. An individual from a city interested in water quality measures will be able to look at the cities which have conducted projects on water quality, organizations that work on water quality, key funding available for water quality and trainings and tools available for implementing water quality measures. Involving advisory committee and therefore key practitioners and stakeholders of the city will help in keeping the interest in the blog. Investing in social marketing can help in making the platform active. During our past work with city governments in India we have frequently heard city officials asking for a common platform where they could see what other cities are doing. This platform can help in bridging the gap. Our pilot cities include enthusiastic city officials who are excited to have such a pilot platform. This will further contribute to the initial kick off for the portal.