This announcement at the ongoing Openworld event in San Francisco follows Oracle’s recent commitment with the prime minister of India Narendra Modi to support the country’s global digital initiatives as part of which Oracle had unveiled a new campus in Bengaluru, nine incubation centers throughout India, and an initiative to train more than half a million students each year to develop computer science skills.

As part of the MoU, the Maharashtra government and Oracle will create a Centre of Excellence (CoE) to help accelerate its smart city program and modernise the government’s technology solutions. The CoE, housed in Mumbai, will serve as a research platform to design, develop and test new capabilities intended to deliver better services to citizens and businesses. As part of the project, 29,000 villages of the state will be connected through fibre optics. 

The proposed projects, to be finalised before the end of the calendar year, include smart city in a box; mobile platform for service questions; unified app development for services like driving license renewals or property tax payments; digital platform to deliver smart city services across the state; and connected infrastructure across all devices, kiosks and citizens.

Many of these projects will support the government’s e-services program which was initiated in April to develop 10 smart cities, adding to the 33 announced by the central government in the 100 Smart Cities initiative. Five cities of Maharashtra have just been outlaid by Modi to be part of the Smart Cities initiative for this fiscal.