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Digitizing our Economy with Smart Cities

           Back in the mid-twentieth century there was much talk of traffic jams and urban congestion being eliminated in the future. While the same was planned through infrastructure development, large-scale increased in urban population coupled with limited resources resulted in further aggravation of issues however, technology advancement and adoption is now changing the very nature cities and the advent of the smart city concept. With Big Data, Internet of Things, Machine to Machine and Mobility coming together, cities are evolving from mere population centers to model of social and economic development centers. In India, the government’s focus on building 100 smart cities in the country has created a lot of buzz on the subject. It is a welcome move for countries and states to think in this direction and will ensure better citizen services in the digital economy which is all set to unfold.

A city can be defined as being smart when it uses digital tools to substantially enhance efficiency for public services, utilize innovative and disruptive technology for creating and delivering services to citizens and in the process makes dramatic positive economic and social impact to the society as a whole. The applications for digital tools across different independent functions of the ‘smart city’ have been catching up of late. Today’s cities are looking up to technology to provide solutions to a wide range of issues –be it connected meters, for gas, water or electricity or Intelligent transport system for Traffic management, congestion and parking, from intelligent energy management systems installed in the home, in the building or in a whole area to connected cars, providing connectivity in the car for emergency call and several similar smart solutions.

However, while smart cities are rightly expected to be revolutionary in the coming years, the developments and technology adoption stages differ around the world. For example, in Europe, we witness smart infrastructure for water, gas, electricity, transportation, telecom, which is well managed and invested. In India, components of smart cities are being deployed in existing cities for better city management. A recent initiative by the Government of Bihar, which was supported by us, aims at improving city security with the help of integrated fleet management, public emergency calling facility along with a surveillance system in the city of Patna. Similar technology deployments like these are fast penetrating existing cities with overstretched infrastructure and overloaded population to find smarter ways to perennial problems like traffic, security and other public services. The context in the Middle East is however different since they are not starting the adoption process for existing infrastructure, instead building smart from the very beginning. We have been working on such projects in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Dubai and find the scale to be phenomenal.

We also find adoption in China to be quite interesting, like new Pudong area in Shanghai. In the U.S., San Francisco and New York City are really moving ahead and trying to improve the relationship with citizens through technology. From the Indian context, the aim is to bring a balanced approach in the expansion of urban areas while addressing challenges of urban living.

We have been using small components of ‘smart spaces’ in different public services over the last few years. Several state transport departments are evaluating intelligent transport systems, machine to machine enabled fleet management solutions while citizen interfacing departments are looking at cloud solutions to  store citizen data and other technology enabled applications for the public distribution .To create a ‘smart city’ several technology building blocks are required, ranging from NFC to machine-to-machine (M2M), Wi-Fi and IT integration, as well as supporting telecom services such as 3G and 4G connectivity (for e.g., for application access and monitoring).

Faster mobile networks are at the heart of smart cities and are enabling people to do more on the move. With the increasing mobile penetration in India of more than 900 million mobile subscribers and extensive 4G rollouts expected in the coming months, a large piece of the smart country puzzle is being addressed. Also, as networks offer more cloud-based services and storage, richer content and citizen services applications can be available to end-users. Smarter devices, faster networks and cloud ubiquitous will all contribute to this digitization of society. Internet of Things (IoT) will also play a key role in smart city development.

The sheer weight of Big Data generated by the IoT will impact everything, for example, traffic flow information – town planners will be able to gather the data, analyze it and use it to tailor future policy and project. The future will witness integrated services, based on gathering data through sensors and delivering it to smart devices to make life easier for both citizens and administrations all of which will be enabled through the smart adoption of Technology.

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Business Insider Albert.

Date: 15-07-2019