Maharashtra govt appoints L&T to make Nagpur a smart city

Maharashtra government has handed the letter of intent to Larsen & Toubro (L&T) appointing it as the implementation partner to make Nagpur India’s first large-scale integrated smart city.

The Maharashtra government has adopted an independent model for all the ten cities listed to be developed as smart cities. The ten cities are Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Amravati, Solapur, Nashik, Aurangabad, Kalyan-Dombivali, Thane,Pimpri-Chinchwad.

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has already rolled out the project with specifications and a timeline for Nagpur, which also happens to be his hometown. The state government has also decided to develop Nagpur, which is logistically significant being located in the centre point of India, complete with five hubs from textile centres to defence sectors.

The scope of work in phase 1 for L&T’s smart world communications business vertical, which is a part of L&T Construction, will cover laying of 1200 km of optical fibre network backbone, creating 136 City Wi-Fi hotspots at key locations, establishing 100 digital interactive kiosks and developing city surveillance systems with 3800 IP based cameras. Further, as an avant-garde endeavour, the city has identified a strip of approximately 6 km (from Japanese Garden Square to Orange City Hospital Square) to be developed as a ‘Smart Strip’ with state-of-the-art systems powered by smart ICT interventions like smart transport, solid waste management, smart lighting, etc. which can be leveraged in a phased manner to ultimately cover the entire city.

“After Jaipur, this is the most significant step in the country’s journey towards establishing smart cities and we are delighted to be participating in transforming Nagpur into one. As a master systems integrator, we will provide leading edge technology solutions including high end analytics, mobile surveillance and high-tech tools like drones,” said S N Subrahmanyan, deputy managing director and president, Larsen & Toubro.

According to Vijay Kumar Gautam, principal secretary, Government of Maharashtra, “The Nagpur Smart City project is a major milestone for the Government of Maharashtra. The initiative will be driven by the government’s Department of Information & Technology. We envisage it as a very structured programme replete with several digital technology elements. The ‘Smart Strip’ will be a new and exciting concept attempted for the first time in the country.”

Beginning with the development of surveillance and intelligent traffic management systems for the Government of Gujarat in Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Vadodara and a surveillance and management system of critical infrastructure at the Sabarmati Jail, L&T has since executed the smart city project in Jaipur and is executing India’s largest city surveillance project comprising 6000 cameras across 1500+locations in Mumbai for the Government of Maharashtra. Projects are also underway in Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad.

The LoI was signed in Mumbai in presence of chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and elected members from Nagpur, senior officials from state government and L&T.