CIOInsider India Magazine
How Can Smart City Initiatives Discipline The City Snags
Karthikeyan is an Engineering Services Outsourcing Expert,Six Sigma Master Black Belt , Reliability Expert,Certified PMP Professional and holds the ability to conceptualize, create strategic roadmaps,build and lead global engineering teams.
For many years a myriad of applications are already enabling 'smart' interactions with city services. From smart phone apps for mapping, delivering and monitoring to other aspects of life being governed by the smart initiatives, technology has brought the smart feature to forefront. Yet,a 'smart-city' holds a broader concept that can profoundly transfer the functioning of cities and how people experience it. While India is intended to improve its Ease of Doing Business ranking and attracting FDI, India's desire to spend about USD 15 billion in smart city initiative is understandable.
The trend of modern Indian demography typically shows the major migration towards cities and urban towns. This suggests an increasing strain on resources, energy where 'smart'city solutions indicate optimized resource solutions rather than maximizing the solutions. The smart city is basically the ICT implementation which has become a keystone of everyday life. The ever increasing presence of data have spiraled the need of setting data centers. The data and information that we receive on various services are being used by the citizens, essentially around 5-6 areas whether it's intelligent traffic management,security surveillance, parking, lighting, waste management along with environment management.
The backbone of smart city information exchange
An example of how seamless information exchange can leverage smart city initiatives can be seen in UP dial. It is set up to manage the complete police force deployment in the city and 23k police personnel deployed in a daily basis. This is based on data that they collect on call center plus security surveillance camera and start
identifying the prone areas for criminal acts and henceforth can be ready before hand for any undue incidences. The entire workflow is done based on the command center set up in Lucknow. As soon as one enters the command center, it becomes the insulation exchange center,a knowledge center and it starts managing the workforce .Because of the data that is flowing in to the exchange center, police administration were able to maximize and optimize the police force. With all these they can manage everything far better than what they did in the past. When a particular incident is deducted in an area, information plays a very vital role to condition the requirement of police personal to be deployed.These are the ways with which work flows are being defined with the help of information and data.
The Biggest Challenge Faced During Any Disaster Is How Fast And Efficiently The Communication Is Established Before The Whole System Collapses
See, in my view there won't be any ideal situation. To me avoiding any disaster/deaths during the calamities is fore most and that might need an established communication beyond cellular network because many times there are instances when continuity is damaged during calamities hampering recovery. The biggest challenge faced during any disaster is how fast and efficiently the communication is established before the whole system collapses? The smart City initiative can integrate the disaster management into the smart cities concept. In my view it’s more of a concept which will take about one two decades to evolve, but I think we have made a right beginning and it will scale up in terms of operations. How you manage the disasters and minimize the impact on societies and how fast and efficiently the normalcy is resumed back is a field that is witnessing several initiatives. So it is about having correct information at correct time to make it available to the right people. It's more of disaster and crisis management. For these, the infrastructure needed is not going to be built overnight.Only over a period of time,there will be some kind of incremental change. We still need to manage the smart service that has been provided. This will bring in smart services and infrastructure that will keep on expanding. This is an on-going journey for the next few years in nurturing perfection in terms of what had been conceptualized and thought of.
Internalizing the High Tech Solutions within the Existing Social Ethos
We need more people in conceptualizing, planning. And this big shift will enable many smart initiatives. The other factor is the way the municipal services would be working in the waste management/parking fee collection and automating most of the areas. With new initiatives newer workflows will be created enabled by techniques and models. A new set of governance is also required where one needs to shift from 'just-operation' to more of 'planning and operations'. This will open a space where a lot of data is found available which can be used for many purposes. The ultimate impact of smart city concept can be gauged when the impacts of smart initiatives can be seen on the daily lives of people with the data collected, the data stored, the data analyzed and the data monetized all unitedly running the smart city journey.
