Need safe and smart cities for Indian industries

India has been prioritising the importance of smart cities and digitisation for quite some time. Digital India initiatives, including citizen engagement through government-to-citizen (G2C) services and increasing dependency on automation, are components of the same thought. Now, with the pandemic wreaking havoc on the world, we need the unrivaled security, sustainability and socio-economic prosperity that only smart cities could manifest.

The critical year of 2020 found smart cities in South Korea and Taiwan delivering substantial value to their inhabitants over their conventional counterparts. Many cities were successful in effectively collaborating with internet providers to boost capacity for citizen help and frontline workers. It also encouraged them to maintain centralised control rooms to monitor and administer numerous activities in the city and seamless coordination with police, administrative offices and healthcare authorities. The rise of telehealth and teleconsultation by government authorities also played a huge role in handling the situation.

How smart building can be a game changer in maintaining safety -

COVID-19 has alerted the course of our lives while increasing the role of technology professionally and personally. Connected buildings extend the scope of technology on a community level as it can be used to ensure proper safety standards for the community and effectively monitor the spread of the virus.

Relevance of smart cities in the post-covid reality –

Rebuilding the economy and facilitating healthcare will be the top priority of India post-covid 19, and smart cities will play a significant role in accelerating development in both areas. Smart cities infrastructure will be leveraged to create a connected administrative environment to achieve seamless inter-agency collaboration like healthcare, finance, command, and control centres which otherwise takes a tedious chain of regulations to function. Moreover, technology-led interventions in a cohesive manner will also ensure optimum safety and security of the citizens. In addition, the use of data and real-time implementation and monitoring of government policies can be streamlined with more transparency.

Role of government and the use of technology in building smart cities - 

With its National Infrastructure Pipeline, the government of India has envisaged an expenditure of $1500 billion in the next 5 years, of which the urban infrastructure project constitutes a prominent $250 billion. Currently, India’s Smart Cities Mission is aimed at developing 100 cities by using digital technologies to improve urban infrastructure.

However, to build an eco-system of smart living, principles of strategic infrastructure development are of paramount importance. New-age technologies conceptualise smart cities infrastructure with intelligent solutions to design, execute, and manage the project in the planning and execution stages. To achieve the same, government bodies need a judicious mix of internal competency development and strategic alliances with technology providers.

Smart solutions like ERP and IoT will enable governments to inculcate attributes of smartness in the construction operations through data-centric operations. This will improve the construction quality and reduced timeframes to deliver smart functions for smart cities.

The need for smart and safe cities cannot be undermined. Though India is proactively investing in healthcare and public safety matters, it needs to get the smart city projects in action mode soon. Also, it needs to invest in long term urban healthcare infrastructure that can accommodate the population while keeping the country on par with the developed nations. Given that urban cities contribute about 63% of the GDP, fashioning them with the right technology will only help to fast-track the economy’s revival.

The author of the article is Ashok Wani, Head–Technology & Innovation Highbar Technocrat