| |August 20199our cities polluted and congest-ed. The urbanization challenges have created a perfect case for the deployment of multimodal trans-port. Automobile giants and lead-ing technology companies have taken this as an opportunity to leverage IoT to develop transport solutions that power the future of seamless experiences. In today's day and age, trans-port solutions have become widely diversified with options like metro, bullet trains, and light electric ve-hicles, reinforcing the need for ca-pacitive transport networks. More-over, the launch of on-demand cab services like Ola and Uber has led to interesting on-demand offer-ings such as ride-sharing via cars, scooters and free-floating bikes, enabling a growing number of peo-ple to quickly and safely travel into, out of and around cities.Further, the proliferation of digital technology, high-speed networks, platforms, and smart-phones has made information flow seamless between operators, transport authorities and passen-gers. This information exchange, data capture, and analysis serves as a unique platform of opportu-nity to collaborate and anticipate breakdowns, optimize resources, prepare for planned events and respond to unexpected events such as weather, diversions or demonstrations, etc.Multimodal TransportMulti-modal transport, or mixed-mode commuting, makes use of public and private transit options, to efficiently navigate through ur-ban environments. With the advent of next-generation technologies like 5G, IoT, and AI, the transport industry, is well poised for growth and we will soon witness major changes in the form of electric ve-hicles (EVs), shared mobility, and better safety norms. The Indian market poses a great opportunity in terms of emerging youth popu-lations who are tech-savvy and ex-pect their vehicles to deliver much more than just mobility.Implementing new technolog-ical innovations to mobilize the economy will significantly help in reducing operational costs and maximizing efficiency. It will help in reducing congestion, road traf-fic accidents, energy consumption, greenhouse-gas emissions, and dependency on fossil fuel. The Role of GovernmentMulti-modal transport is gaining momentum and being promoted by a growing number of city and national governments. In Europe, sustainable Intelligent Transport System (ITS) services are part of the European Commission's ac-tion plan and directive for mobility and transport.Taking cognizance of the situa-tion, the Government of India, with requisite technology support from the new-age organizations, has tak-en some concrete measures to build a robust infrastructure that meets the mobility-related requirements of the country.As part of its `Smart Cities' initiative to shape up the digital landscape of the country, the Gov-ernment of India is making invest-ments in the development of smart concepts that will help in imple-menting a vision of advanced and modern urbanization. India has recently launched its first multi-modal terminal in Va-ranasi as part of its `Jal Marg Vikas' project and is in talks with Russia and Iran to implement the Interna-tional North South Transport Cor-ridor (INSTC) (shortest multimod-al transportation route linking the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf via Iran to Russia and Europe). These initiatives will help us sus-tain our progress on this amazing digital transformational journey.ConclusionDigital technologies like IoT pro-vides a massive growth opportuni-ty for the Indian IT industry over the next few years, especially with regards to the multimodal trans-port industry. Increasing proliferation of IoT and next hen technologies like Artificial Intelli-gence will ensure that we leverage technology to develop useful, on-demand services, for the bene-fit of our consumers. It will even-tually drive everything around to offer more than what we currently experience through Connected Cars, Connected Aircraft, Connect-ed Consumers, Connected Energy, and the possibilities are simply endless.
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