Is the govt's Smart City programme really merit-based?

The government last week unveiled the list of 98 cities that have qualified in the first round of the Smart City programme. While the centre maintains the selection is strictly merit-based, CNBC-TV18's Nayantara Rai has picked up some interesting insights into the politics behind the project.Rae Bareli, the constituency of Congress President Sonia Gandhi scored 75 out of 100, i.e. the same as Meerut, represented by BJP MP Rajendra Agarwal in the Lok Sabha. While in all cases, the centre has gone with the state recommendation, it has not done so when it came to UP. Sources say Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav had picked Rae Bareli over Meerut. Agarwal has alleged the Akhilesh Yadav government manipulated numbers in favour of Rae Bareli, where most elected representatives are from Congress or SP as against his constituency Meerut, where the mayor, three MLAs and the MP are all from the BJP.Then lets head to to Haryana, where Karnal came in the 1st spot with a score of 90. Faridabad came second by winning 87.5 points. Gurgaon, the highest revenue grosser for the state and often referred to as the MNC capital of India, has missed the cut. Union minister Rao Inderjit Singh and the MP from Gurgaon is promising to take up the issue with Naidu. Further north, the Centre had rejected the J&K government's demand for 2 candidates for smart cities. This development came amid reports of an alleged strain in relations between the BJP and PDP in ruling the state as a coalition. Having missed the July 31 deadline of submitting its smart city nominees, the ruling PDP-BJP alliance is still deciding between the summer capital of Srinagar and the winter capital of Jammu.Down south, Congress chief minister of Karnataka Siddaramaiah's list of six candidates surprisingly never included Bengaluru, india's IT capital. The decision to omit Bengaluru, that houses one third of the global IT workforce, had become a flashpoint between the BJP and the Congress in the recently concluded elections for the city's civic body, the Brahut Bengaluru Mahanagara.