Everything about resiliency is about being relevant today and tomorrow. A lot of disasters that are being seen today, are manmade and those can be solved if technology is used wisely.
Infrastructure resilience is a key factor for economic growth, for opportunities in the Indian economy. There are a lot of infrastructure related activities going on in the country such as the national infrastructure pipeline, the GatiShakti master plan, the geospatial energy map and others. The potential of geospatial and other technologies like building information modeling (BIM), frontier technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), cloud, and big data, are of great importance.
In the panel titled “Empowering Next Generation Resilient Infrastructure”, the esteemed panelists included Amit Ghosh, Additionally Secretary, Ministry of Road, Transport and Highways (MoRTH); Kamal Kishore, Member Secretary, National Disaster Management Authority; Sunil MK, Head – AEC, Autodesk; and Srinivas Rao, CIO/CTO, L&T IDPL. The panelists discussed at great length about why resilient infrastructure is required in our country, what are the steps that they are taking and what are the next generation technologies that we need to look at to advance sustainability and resiliency in our infrastructure.
Why resilient infrastructure?
Ananyaa Narain, Director, GW Consulting, Geospatial World said, “Resiliency is something that we need to develop which is key to maintain any infrastructure. Going forward it absorbs all the shocks that an economy faces like the natural disasters. There is a need in our country to build infrastructure which is resilient and sustainable.”
Kamal Kishore, Member Secretary, National Disaster Management Authority explained how geospatial technologies, BIM technologies when applied across value chain can have an amazing impact in cost efficiency, improving the productivity. “If you look at what the world will build in the next 20 years in terms of infrastructure, it will be more than what has been built in the last 200 years. It is really going to be a massive investment in the sector. There are many projections. According to one projection between 2015 and 2040, the world will invest close to $90 trillion in developing infrastructure. If you look at India, energy production is likely to double over the same period of time. The length of metro lines is going to increase by six times as compared to 2015’s baseline and road infrastructure is likely to grow by 1.5 times,” added Kishore.
Being relevant today and tomorrow
Everything about resiliency is about being relevant today and tomorrow. A lot of disasters that are being seen today, are manmade and those can be solved if technology is used wisely. Then there are natural disasters and natural calamities that are inescapable, which is why it is important to make the cities more resilient for tomorrow. So that they can jump back to life much faster than they do today. Sunil MK, Head – AEC, Autodesk said, “After hit by floods or any other natural disaster, our cities get paralyzed, so in a way we need climate resilience infrastructure. The defining characteristic of climate resilient infrastructure is that it is planned, designed, built and operated in a way that it is anticipated, prepared for and adapts to the changing climate condition. It can also withstand, respond to and recover rapidly from disruption caused by the climatic condition.”
Srinivas Rao, CIO/CTO, L&T IDPL said, “We are investing a lot on bridge management systems and pay way management systems and then completely IoT sensor based systems. We are also coming up with complete integrated data link, data warehouse and we have already moved into the cloud, so all our systems are of centralized irrespective of which location. So I would say that apart from the data driven system, it has to be integrated systems with combination of various latest technologies as well data available and accessible by anyone from anywhere.”
He added that there are very old bridges, which were constructed years ago, some of them are 50-100 years old, but as they are maintained now using the frontier technology using IoT, different sensors on the bridge which are able to calculate whether the bridge will be able take that load or pressure. “We are building data and then overlaying it on geospatial technologies, on the map components. Once we complete this journey of maintaining all the highway projects we are working on right now, we will have a complete centralized system. That centralized system will allow those in central control room to see which bridge is going for near repair. Basically it will function as preventive maintenance and corrective actions,” concluded Rao.
