The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), had launched two unique national-level challenges as part of activities under Azadi Ka Amrut Mahotsav (AKAM) between 1st to 26th January 2022. The challenges were “Freedom 2 Walk and Cycle Challenge for City Leaders” and “Inter-City Freedom 2 Walk and Cycle Challenge for Citizens”. The challenges aim at motivating the citizens to adopt healthier life choices in a celebratory spirit. Furthermore, it also serves to elevate the perspective of the citizens through long-term behavioural changes, towards taking up walking and cycling.
In order to recognize the top-performing cities and city leaders in both the events, an online awards event was hosted by MoHUA on Thursday, said a statement released by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. The event also put forward the goals that cities participating in the “Cycles4Change”, “Streets4People” and “Transport4All” events will be striving to achieve in 2023. The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) is the knowledge partner of Smart Cities Mission for the events.
The impact of the Challenges
From across the country, around 130 city leaders had registered in the “City Leaders Challenge”. The registration comprised of Commissioners, Additional Commissioners, Joint Commissioners, Deputy Commissioners, Smart City CEOs and key SPV officials. The participants jointly achieved around 47,000 km of cycling, 7000 km of walking and 2500 km of running during the Challenge. The citizens challenge also registered overwhelming participation from nearly 22,000 citizens from the registered 75 cities. They jointly completed nearly 9,80,000 km of cycling, 1,82,000 km of walking and 9,350 km of running.
The ‘City Leaders Challenge’ had multiple awards categories such as the cities that completed maximum kilometers, the city leaders who completed maximum kilometers, woman city leaders who undertook the maximum kilometers, the city leaders who spent the maximum in the activities, City leaders who participated in a maximum number of activities, awards for the ministers, CEOs and Commissioners who completed maximum kilometers and the Super Hero Award.
The awards for the citizen challenge also had two categories, namely the Cities with maximum kilometers and the cities with maximum registrations. To encourage the drive even after the Challenge, the cities that participated are signing pledges to commit to standardizing the activities like Cycle2Work, Open Street Events, Pedestrian Days and physical infrastructure so as to promote and improve the walking and cycling activities in the cities. 18 Cities have signed the pledges so far, which includes – Ajmer, Nashik, Rajkot, Lucknow, Kalyan Dombivli, Bhubaneshwar, Jabalpur, Tumakuru, Surat, Valsad, Dahod, Nagpur, Ranchi, Chandigarh, Kakinada, Ujjain, Pimpri Chinchwad, Indore. Other cities such as Aurangabad, Jaipur, Davanagere, Sagar, Pune are in the process of signing the pledge.
2023 Goals for India Cycles4Change, Streets4People and Transport4All Challenges
The Government of India had launched the ‘Cycles4Change’ and ‘Streets4People’ in 2020 to inspire more than 100 cities in redefining the streets as safe, happy and healthy public spaces. The Government strives to make the Indian cities cycling friendly. The vision is in accordance with the National Urban Transport Policy (2006) that had called for a shift from vehicle focused roads to people-focused streets.
The ‘Transport4All Challenge’ was launched in 2021 aiming to bring together cities, citizens, and startups, and to develop solutions that could improve public transport to better serve the needs of all citizens. Gaining motivation from these challenges, the cities have adopted a new sutra of engaging with citizens, crowdsourcing ideas and testing innovative, inexpensive, and quick solutions to create walking and cycling-friendly streets.
The online awards event discussed new initiatives and events that the cities should work towards till 2023, which included permanent pilots, policy adoptions and institutional interventions.
