Stakeholders harp on the government's infrastructure push and expect construction orders of Rs.18 trillion in the next six years. This order inflow volume should support 12 to 15 per cent of industry-level execution of compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

In the next five years, special purpose vehicles (SPVs) will be spending around Rs.1,631 billion on projects conceived under area-based development and Rs.388 billion on pan-city development.

We have already started working on most of the projects that were conceived under the smart city proposal, whether it is area-based development (ABD) or pan city development.

Our city was ranked fourth in the first smart city challenge. We are also part of the 20 lighthouse cities in round 1. From March 2016, we have started implementing projects. Since then, we have covered a lot of ground and almost 95 per cent of the work order for the projects have been released.

We have a number of projects in the pipeline. We are trying to start with smart buses, which will run inter and intra-city.

Imphal was selected in the fasttrack round of smart city challenges. Since then, we have formed the special purpose vehicle (SPV) and are in the process of appointing project management consultancy (PMC).

There are many sources to fund projects envisaged by selected smart cities. One of the important means is grants by governments-state and central. In fact, the smart cities can structure themselves to monetise some of the assets under their possession and identify revenue-generating projects.

Raman Roy is widely referred to as the father of India's BPO revolution. In 2000, his firm Spectramind (sold to Wipro in 2002) was one of the first in the country to get into third-party contracts.

In what should have been a major story that was buried under other headlines, India achieved a significant milestone in its Digital India programme when 100,000-gram panchayats, or village councils, across the country were connected through a high-speed optical fibre network called BharatNet.