Bhubaneswar/Rourkela, Sept. 26: The municipal corporation in the capital city today launched a citizens' connect initiative for the smart city mission to ensure that people got involved in it.

Under this initiative, the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation will organise two contests - Envision Bhubaneswar and Design a logo - in the first phase. It also launched a website on the smart city mission.

People from various walks of life - students, activists, lawyers, senior citizens and non-government organisations - took part in today's event and made suggestions to make the citizens' participation more effective for the smart city goal.

Two cities from Odisha - Bhubaneswar and Rourkela - have been selected by the Centre to be included in the list of 100 smart cities in the country.

The smart city guidelines call for direct participation of the citizens and the civic bodies of both the cities are making efforts to involve people.

Development commissioner U.N. Behera requested the civic body to address issues such as water, sewerage and urban transport and select priority areas laid down under the smart city guidelines.

Urban development secretary G. Mathivathanam said: "Smart city does not mean only IT development and having Wi-Fi services across the city. It should also see how people from all walks of life are benefited by the implementation of the programme."

In Rourkela, the municipal corporation is holding meetings and collecting suggestions from residents on ways to make the city truly smart.

Over the past two weeks, municipal corporation commissioner Durga Mohapatra, along with his staff members, has visited many organisations in the city to assess the mood and get inputs from the residents for the final presentation on smart city which will take place before the end of this year. The team has visited most of the technical colleges in the city and also met some of the citizens' forums for more information.

"We are doing it in a citizen-centric manner, so that we can have more ideas to make our claim stronger," Mohapatra told The Telegraph.

The corporation is interacting with all sections of the society and has covered almost all the colleges. It will hold more meetings with different organisations, the non-organised sector, the street vendors and slum-dwellers.

"This way, we will have the views of all the stakeholders be able to make our plans more citizen-specific and transparent," said Mohapatra.

An MBA student, Rajesh Yadav, said: "We all took part in the interaction and I felt I contributed in my little way to the smart city plan."