Physical contours of smart cities to be visible by June this year - Smart Cities Summit 2018

Technological innovations are inevitable component to a city development project planning. Best fit frugal solutions across all basic infrastructure sectors must be identified and acknowledged so that cities can keep up to the fast evolving world of technology and can also adopt the most viable and efficient technology to make the city smart and connected. Smart Cities Mission is one of the key initiatives wherein innovative solutions will be introduced to recast the urban landscape of the country and make the cities more inclusive and livable and with a steady economic growth. ‘Smart Cities Summit 2018’, organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry was a day-long summit held in New Delhi on January 16th, the summit deliberated on ‘Connecting the Cities’ from stakeholders’ perspectives and ‘Smart City Interaction and Project Showcasing’. Realty Plus reports the highlights of the event. Inaugurating the summit, Hardeep Singh Puri, Minister of State (Independent Charge), Housing and Urban Affairs, said, “Under the government’s ‘Smart Cities Mission’, 3000 projects worth Rs 1.4 lakh crore in 90 cities were under implementation and over Rs 1 lakh crore worth of projects were being readied for tendering. “By June this year you will begin to see the physical contours of the processes involved in setting up smart cities such as surveillance systems, improved communications, citizens’ feedback management systems, ease of living for the poor, the aged and differently abled people, etc.” Some of the main challenges, he said, were mitigating the impact of carbon emissions in cities, deployment of environmentally-friendly technologies, cleanliness and sanitation. Smart cities would also require efficient public transport, over bridges, foot and cycle paths and greening of spaces, all of which would have to be designed to facilitate the free and unrestricted movement of people, he pointed out. Puri said that the government proposes to set up an expert group to look into how smart cities would encourage and cope with the aspirations of the continually growing young professionals who will occupy urban spaces. On the occasion, the Minister released the FICCI-PwC Knowledge Report titled, ‘Blockchain: The next innovation to make our cities smarter’. Martin Harman, former Senior Partner and Chairman of Pinsent Masons LLP, spoke of the opportunities in project delivery in smart infrastructure and shared his experience of working on international infrastructure projects. The ‘Smart Cities Mission’, he said, offered an opportunity to create a world leading, integrated and innovative procurement and implementation strategy, fit for the purpose of 21^st century India and beyond. Smart cities, he added, needed smart processes, of which collaborative contracting and avoidance of conflict were some of the essential components. Answering to Realty Plus on the sidelines of the event on the aspect of need of creating a standardise model for Smart Cities, Anjum Parwej, Secretary (M&UDA), Urban Development Department, Government of Karnataka, “Standardisation is very important, because we can’t take the same amount of time as we are taking in these 100 cities to when we will move to other cities. This is the reason that Govt of India and state Govt are in constant discussions. I’ll state the example of  Karnataka, where 7 cities were struggling with RFT for control and command centre, so we zeroed down that let’s concentrate on one city at a time, improve the control and command systems at one place and the same standardisation will then be carried forward to the other cities as well.” Further adding on how the standardisation of smart roads have been done, Parwez, stated, “For smart road the components are underground cabling and ducting is required, WI-fi needs to be connected. So, while we will maintain the standardisation but at the same time we need to scale up our operations too.” Reiterating the sentiment on creating standardisation, Arvind Ronta, Head of Products-India and South Asia, Visa, said, “Digital payments will have a great role to play in standardising and increasing operation efficiencies.” Ronta, further added, “Four pillars of creating a smart city are connectivity-mobilty-security- safety and digital payments will have a big role to play in keeping cities connected and hence is an important stakeholder in creating a smart city.” Talking on another important tenet of managing intelligent traffic and transportation and its role in smart cities, Harjinder Kaur, MD & CEO, Comvision, said, smart card based payment systems, passes, toll-passes, e-Purse, integration with roads embedded sensors, traffic count, vehicle classifications, integration with cameras, IP based cameras, CCTV cameras, integrating with DVR & PTZ cameras and PA system, emergency telephone systems , Variation Message Integration Protocol are some of the ways by which etoll integration is possible.” The day long summit concluded on the note that Big Data-Artificial Intelligence and Connectivity are three important aspects of smart cities and the integration of these three are important to create future ready cities, reported, Realty Plus.