The Union Urban Development Ministry has received 85 of the 98 Smart City proposals as states and union territories kept to the stipulated deadline of Dec 15.

The only exceptions were Tamil Nadu, which sought more time to submit 12 proposals due to floods in Chennai and Telangana which sought to replace Hyderabad with another city.

While 17 proposals were submitted on Dec 14 by seven states and one union territory, the ministry received 68 proposals on Dec 15. The total investment proposed in the 85 city plans is around Rs 2.5 lakh crores.

The ministry had provided eight region-wise panels of consultants, and states and urban local bodies could choose consultants for preparation of Smart City proposals through tendering. Thirty foreign companies from 20 countries have been associated with the preparation of Smart City proposals of 45 mission cities.

These included KPMG, McKinsey, CISCO Systems, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, JLL, Dorsh Holding GmbH, Knight Frank, Tractabel Engineering SA, Haskoning DHV Consulting, Grant Thornton, Happold Engineers and Ecorys Netherlands BV.

The total population of 98 mission cities is 130 million accounting for 35 per cent of country’s urban population. The capital cities that have not been included in the Smart City Mission are Bengaluru, Gangtok, Itanagar, Kolkata, Patna, Shimla and Trivandrum.

Cities with which foreign companies were associated in preparation of Smart City proposals include New Delhi Municipal Council, Agartala, Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Aurangabad, Bhagalpur, Bhubaneswar, Bhopal, Greater Mumbai, Ghaziabad, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Pune, New Town Kolkata, Kota, Ranchi, Rourkela, Ujjain, Visakhapatnam, Tirupati, Tumakuru (Karnataka).

Cities that were short-listed for the project include Vishakhapatnam, Port Blair, Guwahati, Chandigarh, NDMC area of Delhi, Navi Mumbai, Pune, Thane, Surat, Gandhinagar, Ahmedabad, Faridabad, Ranchi, Bhopal, Jabalpur, Amritsar, Ludhiana, Jaipur, Udaipur, Ajmer, Lucknow, Varanasi, Agra among the total of 98. Uttar Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir are yet to name a city each.