New Delhi, August 19: The smart cities mission has clearly brought into focus the need for use of technologies for delivering urban services to citizens while conserving resources and building self-sustainability. Technologies giants like IBM, Cisco and HP have been at the forefront to work closely with the government and other municipal authorities to understand how technologies can play a critical role to make smart cities safer and future-ready.
These technology providers have been working in the domain of smart technologies for over a decade. To align these IT providers with the urban bodies, Smart Cities Council India at the behest of Government of Telangana, is hosting the ‘ National Conclave on Smart Technologies’ (NCST) from August 22-23 to showcase technologies which can be used in 600 municipalities across India.
IBM, CISCO, HP among others have come together to demonstrate technologies in mobility, e-governance, water, waste management, smart energy etc. These technologies are ready to deploy across India.
Key Smart Cities projects by Cisco
Aamer Azeemi, Managing Director, CISCO Systems, cited various practices which they have already implemented in cities in India.
Among them is the local information kiosk in Mantri mall in Bangalore, “A citizen can walk into the Mantri mall and lodge an FIR,” he informed. This eases the process of lodging FIR by an individual. Through this centre one will be saved of the tiring process of going to a Police station to do the same. The Government of Karnataka is about to implement this pilot project in different areas in the state. Jaipur too is likely to follow suit,” he added.
He elaborated that we are going to see a new era of Smart Cities in the coming decade like in the western world, leading to to huge opportunities for government, industrialists, private sector, academicians and citizens. The smart city concept in India calls for adoption of local ideas and solutions to enhance the quality of life of people.
Key Smart Cities projects by IBM
Lux Rao, Country Leader, HP Future Cities & CTO – Technology Services, talked about the initiatives HP has taken in telemedicine and affordable healthcare through open source technology. “We have executed e-healthcare centres meeting the needs of 140,000 patients in 44 locations in 6 states throughout the country. We have 25 ‘studio doctors’ who are in remote locations addressing the needs of patients,” he informed.
These serve the patients in remote locations with second opinions of doctors who may not be easily accessible to the large number of patients spread across the nation.
He emphasized these would be citizen-centric cities where the citizens would be at the centrestage to decide what services the city needs immediately or in future.
“HP is working to improve the social infrastructure facilities in various cities in India like Healthcare and education. Telemedicine, e-education, Internet of Things, Mobility technology, Digital Locker are some of the initiatives HP is working on” he added.
Lux also said that now IoT (Internet of Things) is bringing benefits to the common people and resulting in substantial and tangible social and economic benefits to consumers, businesses, citizens and government. “Machine to Machine (M2M) is broadly used to describe any technology that enables networked devices to exchange information and perform actions without the manual assistance of humans”, he said.
Key Smart Cities projects by IBM
Dr. Prashant Pradhan, Director, Smarter Planet Business, IBM India and South Asia informed, “We have a portfolio of 2500 projects across the globe and in India we are actively working with Ajmer, Surat, Vishakhapatnam, Allahabad and so on.” He quoted the example of Non-Revenue water (NRW) project in Bangalore which aims at equitable distribution of water in Municipal wards and lowering down the losses.
Another example he cited was the collaboration of IBM with the private real-estate developers to develop the townships as Smart townships with the assistance of technology by IBM. Lodha group’s Pallava city has been developed under this initiative.
“Smart city development is domain-specific, like waste management would be different from traffic management for a city. The cities would also benefit from the use of its professional version of Watson Analytics, which will look to unearth trends in cities’ data. Watson could study travel patterns, public health or the effects of man-made and weather events”, said Dr. Pradhan.
He focused on unique solutions for every city or area since every city has a unique character and need in terms of physical, social and economical infrastructure. So, there cannot be some common solutions to every issue of every city. Cities need to identify those issues and work out accordingly.