The Government of India launched the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) in 2015, with an objective to address the issue of rapid urbanization and promote sustainable living.
Under the mission 100 cities were identified for a makeover and 6,000 project work orders were issued. The project was to be executed within five years starting January 2016. So far 2,098 projects have been completed.
However building smart cities is not easy as there are challenges on multiple fronts including urban planning and budget allocation.
Agendra Kumar, MD, Esri India, laid out a list of must haves for a smart city. He said that every smart city should have smart planning, transparency in governance, smart energy, smart infrastructure, smart buildings, smart security, public safety, smart traffic management, smart waste disposal and smart service delivery mechanisms. “GIS integrates all aspects of city planning and management providing a common operating picture to all. As smart city involves multiple stakeholders, the integration, coordination and synergistic functioning of different participants of the smart city ecosystem is the key for the project to be successful,” he added.
Geospatial technology for better planning, execution
On the second day of Esri India UC 2021, Kunal Kumar, IAS, Joint Secretary & Mission Director (Smart Cities Mission), Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), outlined the way the government uses geospatial technology for the smart city mission.
- Climate change: Visualizing the nature of what is happening in mobility, water management, and waste management or about green spaces, one can be adapt and mitigate the negative effects of climate change.
- Better governance: It’s about better management of new developments taking place, such as making smart cities or building new traffic systems or building new water systems. One needs to know how things are moving and how impacts are created.
- Achievement of Sustainable Development Goals: Geospatial data helps in addressing specific problems in specific neighborhoods.
- Innovation: To be able diagnose the problems and then looking for an innovative solution, which will help in tackling the problem in the most effective manner.
- Connectedness: With the help of geospatial means one can figure out how many people are connected and how many people of the cities have actually rolled out grievance for testing systems and whether solutions to people’s problems are addressed.
- Economic growth: Evidence based planning, such as ease of living, improving the performance of municipalities, and so on.
How GIS helps in the process
Kunal Kumar added that the geospatial management information system in collaboration with Esri, compares real-time correlation of project information, on how cities and states are performing.
He said that with the images taken using geospatial technologies, one can see the progress and predict when certain projects are going to reach future milestones as well as what the shape of the mission going forward is. “The government as a whole would like to create one integrated pathway where cities and state governments and central government can work together in bringing infusion of more digital technologies into the life of people,” Kumar concluded.
