The Prime Minister Narendra Modi on June 25, 2015 released the Operation Guidelines for Smart Cities Mission while launching the Mission at New Delhi. Given the challenges involved in developing 100 smart cities, only the capable cities will be chosen under the Smart Cities Mission through a two-stage competition. The selection criteria to be used in both the stages of competition are elaborated in the Guidelines.
In the Stage-1 of City Challenge Competition, each State and Union Territory will score all their cities based on a set of criteria and nominate the top scorers as per the indicated number of potential smart cities for participation in the Stage-2 of competition. The evaluation criteria for Stage-1 of competition within the State/UT are as below:
