Thursday, December 18, 2014

Successful smart cities pilots required before launching 100 cities initiative: Experts

Chennai:

Even as the Union government is planning to create 100 smart cities,
experts on Monday stressed on the need for successful pilots before
launching the smart city initiative.

Speaking on a panel discussion on ‘Digital Infrastructure: Creating
the smart cities of the future’ during the 13th edition of Connect,
organised by Confederation of Indian Industry and Tamil Nadu
government, director of special projects, World Bank, T V Somanathan
said that smart cities initiative should be taken up after successful
pilots.

He said before the smart city project is being taken up one should
think of social, economic as well as regulatory framework for digital
technology, including social networking as well as Internet are in
place, before going in for smart cities.

Interestingly, the definition of how smart a city should be is
puzzling policy makers, industry as well as the government. Even the
concept note on smart cities is yet to be evolved fully, a policy
maker confided.

Atul Anand, managing director of Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu
said that smart city is more of how a citizen interacts with the
government. “It is about smart transportation and municipalities,” he
said

K K Raman, partner management consulting, Business excellence, KPMG,
says that the valuation of 100 smart cities in India could range to
$35 billion. He also acknowledges that a pilot on smart city would be
the best before the government starts implementing the 100 smart
cities. “This itself could take more than two years,” he says.

However, he says that, “digital infrastructure will power the next
mega trend as connected devices converge bringing more efficiency and
possibilities in the future. Industry players and society need to
leverage digital infrastructure to create more opportunities and
economic value as it is expected to play a major role in the success
of the ‘Make in India’ initiative,” he says.

Interestingly, analysts predict that billions of devices will be
connectable with an ability to drastically enhance the quality of
living and change the way we experience products around us. Digital
infrastructure is expected to create tremendous opportunities for
various technology players across verticals and in key applications
like; smart cities, smart utilities, smart healthcare, smart
transportation and more in India

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