Smart Cities—Unfolding a New India

Smart city project has been working wonders for NDA government because people are still looking forward to ‘ache din’ and believe that they are somewhere in the smart city grid. However, how many of us really understand what a ‘smart city’ is?

Well to begin with, let’s see how it is defined. Frost & Sullivan (2014), "We identified eight key aspects that define a Smart City: smart governance, smart energy, smart building, smart mobility, smart infrastructure, smart technology, smart healthcare and smart citizen." Later it said a city fulfilling 5 out of 8 aspects will be considered a smart city.

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers defines Smar Cities as, "A smart city brings together technology, government and society to enable the following characteristics: smart cities, a smart economy, smart mobility, a smart environment, smart people, smart living, smart governance."

According to the Indian Government , "Smart City offers sustainability in terms of economic activities and employment opportunities to a wide section of its residents, regardless of their level of education, skills or income levels.”

The Indian School of Business (ISB), a Punj Lloyd initiative, will develop the index for smart cities. It would be rooted in the Indian context though it has been modelled after some of the best international indices. The project will allow comparisons among cities and rank them based on how they perform. It will assess improvements over the time and also serve as the measure of a city's livability and smartness.

In a statement, Prime Minister Modi said that cities should be identified as hubs of economic activity, and there should be adequate focus on turning “waste to wealth,” which includes solid waste management and waste-water treatment. He also emphasized on visualizing urban-dependent population in addition to “urban” population, while planning for these smart cities.

“The city of the future will be built on technologies like collaboration, video and data. Technology will be embedded into the city to deliver improved urban services like public safety and security, healthcare, intelligent buildings and green energy. With TelePresence in every home, the shift that a browser brought to the world of commerce through online business will be brought to the service industry through on demand services. The entire city will run on network information and offer citizen services,” Purushottamm Kaushik, MD, Sales, Growth Verticals, Cisco India and SAARC.

However, the challenge in India extends to both ‘brownfield’ (making old, established cities smarter) as well as ‘greenfield’ brand new cities.

Smart City business model

Frost & Sullivan research estimates a combined market potential of $1.5 tn globally for the smart city market in segments of energy, transportation, healthcare, building, infrastructure, and governance. Accordingly, four models are in use, through which companies are engaging with city authorities and utilities to tap into this market, viz, Build Own Operate (BOO), Build Operate Transfer (BOT), Build Operate Manage (BOM) and Open Business Model (OBM).

Types of Participants

India’s contribution  comes to $1.2bn wherein it is being helped by Japan, China and US in building its smart cities. In January 2015, India signed three agreements with the United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) for developing Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh, Ajmer in Rajasthan and Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh as model smart cities.

Alcatel Lucent is leveraging its capabilities in building India’s first smart city Gujarat International Finance Tec-City Company Ltd (GIFTCL). It will be addressing 4-5 components, within the smart city. The components are – unified communication, LAN and WAN requirements of a smart city, Wi-fi. GIFTCL is a joint venture company between state-run Gujarat Urban Development Company (GUDCL) and a private firm Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) that operates and manages the project.

Recently, Cisco and L&T Technology Services tied-up to set up an Internet of Everything (IoE) solutions centre in India, targeting the transport and mass transit industries. The companies claimed that the centre will focus on both technical and business aspects of connected transportation.

Smart cities can be developed over a minimum area of 500 acres and will require at least Rs 6,000 crore of investment for basic and back-end infrastructure. Experts say it can generate employment for at least 200,000 people per city.

In fact, even 10 such new cities can bring in about Rs 9 lakh crore investments (including investments by users) and usher in unprecedented economic growth which Modi is targeting in the next five years. The smart cities will result in new orders for city planning, engineering, designing, and construction companies.

Tech Mahindra, which is working on smart city projects in London and Dubai, is using its experience to implement the smart city solutions within the Mahindra world city Jaipur. “Some of the solutions like the energy management solutions, waste management solutions, water management solutions, car parking solutions, which we have implemented globally, are currently being deployed as pilot in Mahindra World City Jaipur,” says Rishi Mohan Bhatnagar, VP and head Digital Enterprises Services, Tech Mahindra.

According to Jagjit Singh Arora, director, Regional Sales, Red Hat, India, the company is using its vast ecosystem of partners to provide open source infrastructure solutions for smarter cities. We believe that open standards-based architecture with open source software will make it possible for smart cities to survive and thrive. Proprietary stacks have the potential to create lock-in and make it cost prohibitive for consumers and businesses to connect to utilities and citizen services in these smart cities.

System Integretors—What do they Gain?

Smart cities are a gateway of opportunities for system integrators and app developers. Chakrabarti said, “Smart cities involve a lot of networking and connectivity integration so, it comes down to system integrators. Future Netwings is already contributing in West Bengal’s smart city project.” 

“Security is another important area that any smart city would need in order to have proper functioning. Having strengths and long association with ICT industry, Ericsson has already addressed this area by developing various security solutions and implemented emergency response system along with civil warning video-surveillance and automated alerts, etc, says Nishant Batra, VP-Engagement Practices, Ericsson India.

Nityanand Shetty, Essen Vision is positive about the change and  said, “Smart Cities enable  different aspects like Telecommunications, Speed of connectivity, Accessibility, Identity, Availability, Big Data etc which also brings real time challenges that corporates has been facing into civilization process like Lack of Visibility, Compliance, Manageability, Integrity, Availability, Confidentiality and Security. I am sure these initiatives would include certain controls and governance.”

Challenges

The question to ask is how is it different? Does it include urban poor? Will it solve sanitation problem? Will it bring sustainable growth? Will it reduce pollution? Will it be an inclusive structure as per the vision?

Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley earmarked Rs.7,060 crore in the Union Budget 2014-2015 to brainstorm the creation of a 100 “new” smart cities. The allocated budeget was 65% less than the money from central budget allocated for the Statue of Unity.

Historically, cities were never seen as engine of growth. They have always been a centre of culture, commerce, community - all of which are very inefficient. The idea of building ‘smart cities’ which after a long debate between the terms ‘intelligent cities’, ‘digital cities’ and smart cities, was decided. It is important to realize that the structure is being designed by only handful of corporate who don’t even know what it is to be ‘aam admi’ and whether that aam aadmi wants to pay for a smart city or not.

“In smart cities, the combination of IoT and Cloud Technology is expected to spur the creation of an entire cloud-based ecosystem serving stakeholders such as end-users and innovators. However, cloud security will remain one of the key challenges faced,” said Andrew Milroy, senior vice-president, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific.

Another concern is cities might end up becoming censored cities. The right of freedom to expression could be hampered. Data which will be generated nobody knows who will be monitoring and evaluating that. So far, Indian government hasn’t provided laws on emerging technology trends.

The idea itself doesn’t include mass then how can it be an inclusive project. India, cannot afford to be imitating half done ideas. World’s so-called top smart cities include New York, Nice (France), Singapore for reasons like efficient traffic management etc. The question is how much we are paying just to reduce a few minutes of traffic jam.

U.N. Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change Michael Bloomberg has cautioned that global financial institutions are increasingly coming under pressure not to assist any development activity that does not adequately address environment and climate change concerns.

Besides ‘smart cities’ brings huge security challenges. Almost all research reports on security trends in 2015 in cyber world pointed towards IoT as the emerging trend and said, if unmanaged, can bring catastrophic damage. This reminds me of Hollywood movies, Minority report and The Net, which questioned do we really want to be a part of a grid?

Smart City concept is going to cover list of cities in the second largest populated country to implement advanced technologies from scratch, So Implementation is one of the biggest tasks in this project and this should be well planned considering all the operational challenges in considerations. Second biggest challenge is of course to secure communication through access layer and to maintain sanity of information being generated everyday. Third is availability and analytics over big data for forensics and legal investigations against occurrence of incidents.” Says Nityanand Shetty, Essen Vision

A lot of national and local participants also worry about from where they will churn out the returns as for now most of India is not ready for a technology like IoT.

“The key determinant is inclusion. A smart city is not a real estate venture or a gated community for the rich. The key reform required will be at the municipal level. How a city needs to be governed requires a fresh look?” says R K Mishra, founder director of Center for Smart Cities

According to National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA), the stride of migration from rural to urban cities from the existing 377 mn will increase to 600 mn people in 2031. This will give rise to the challenge of the government addressing the issue of giving better standard of living to the migrant populace.

Feasibility

What does government really mean by proper waste management system or 100% water and electricity connectivity. India generates tones of solid and liquid waste in a day; suffers from problem like power theft, limited land, rising levels of pollution, high rate of unemployment etc.

Jaideep Chakrabarti, Future Netwings, believes that ‘smart city concept’ is not feasible for existing cities. If you want to deploy wi-fi enabled CCTV cameras, planning becomes a constraint, as current urban infrastructure is chaotic and requires special planning for different roads even. Idea for existing cities is unfortunately not a smart one. However, if it is about building a new city from barren land then definitely it’s a smart idea.

Employment opportunities which smart cities estimate to generate will require skilled workers. How many Indians are skilled? A centralized data system might help city authorities analyze and predict possible infrastructure failures like power outage or flooding. But do cities have the capacity to prepare effective mitigation plans that will work in their local context? Do cities have the required political and financial autonomy? IBM and Cisco can inform us what areas might get flooded in the monsoon but can they stop flooding from happening?

Looking from west to east, it looks like, government’s smart city projects currently under way are similar to Masdar City in UAE, which is the first smart city of the world, initially slated to be completed by 2015. But Masdar is turning out to be too expensive even for the oil-rich nation, with the project deadline extended to 2025 and many smart features being dropped to cut costs. Masdar’s budget of $22 bn cost to house 50,000 people is a question on development model for India.

A country like India, which is still just one-third urbanised and where half the population of its two biggest cities officially lives in slums or illegal settlements, cannot prioritise exclusionary urbanisation. For instance, a city like Kanpur and Varanasi would need a lot of restructuring before they become ready to adapt. Once, they are ready, which will take long enough, the culture of the entire city would be lost.

Therefore, as far as India is concerned, what we need is ‘smart thinking’, where we can instead of creating three cities in Delhi, per se, can make the entire Delhi smart. The smart thinking shall seamlessly integrate with our traditional cities where culture still runs the economy without creating environmental haphazard.

(with inputs from Krishna Debnath Mukherjee)

A different version of a story on smart cities titled ‘Companies Eye the Smart City Pie ’was carried in Voice and Data