The government has allocated Rs. 98,000 crores for 100 Smart Cities Mission in India. Clearly it is not enough, agrees Pratap Padode, founder and director of Smart Cities Council India. So this is where the private players come in and a lot is dependent on them. Are they willing to take risk? What is the current status of their involvement in this project?
Here it from a player itself; Pratap Pradhan, Director, Smarter Planet Business, IBM India and South Asia, who is leading IBM's Smart City plans in India, in talks with Business Insider India.
What challenges will be faced in implementing the internationally accepted reference models of Smart Cities in India?
We have to first consider what the legacy setup is. Most of the data may not be digital, a lot would be in pen and paper. Just getting the whole operation digitised would be the first challenge.
Second issue is the process discipline. There are books in India on disaster management. But it is not feasible that everybody who is in the middle of a disaster has read and memorised it. It can be done through command and control. This is where video analytics comes in.
Third is institutional capacity, which means that there are people in the department who may not be typically trained in these areas. Most cities in US have Federal Emergency Management Agencies. Technology is a challenge but there also needs to be functional experts in these areas. This is one of our closest programmes with the Indian government.
The government funds allocated for the project is not enough. So a major chunk of investment is expected from the private players. Are the private players willing to take that risk?
The whole concept that smarter cities mean more money is a fallacy. Most of these projects would pay for themselves because the benefits that they reap would bring money.
It can be explained with an example. In one of the cities in US, sewage water was leaking into drinking water. US govt imposes fines for that. The civic authorities were mandated to create infrastructure which would have cost $100 million. So through analytics we installed sensors and found out which are the main blocking areas. We were able to open up 10 million additional capacity of water in the same sewerage system that they already had. So this investment was no longer required.
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