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The Centre is set to launch a five-year National Urban Technology Mission which will infuse technological innovations in municipal services and infrastructure of 4,500 urban local bodies in the country.

The mission, to be spearheaded by the ministry of housing and urban affairs, will have three major sub-heads, a senior official told ET, requesting not to be named. A note prepared for the approval of the expenditure finance committee (EFC) pegs the mission outlay at ₹15,000 crore for five years, the official said.

The first sub-head is online governance. The mission will identify six basic common citizen services which every urban local body will have to offer online. These would necessarily include issuing birth and death certificates, providing water and electricity connections, computation and collection of property tax and grievance redress.

"All urban local bodies claim to offer several services online. Some even list very high numbers like 35 services which are online," the official said. "A close scrutiny of this list shows that these are services that do not affect the lives of citizens, like library management. Under this mission, all urban local bodies will be required to offer six common services to citizens. This will mean that the entire country will offer these services online to the people."

The second sub-head would be monitoring and efficient management of the environmental infrastructure of 1,000 cities. Under the mission, sewage treatment, air quality, flood management and water bodies of these cities will be monitored through technological interventions.

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