Back in 2015, the government of India launched the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) as a response to the fast-paced rural-to-urban movement of the country’s population.
The National Commission on Population (NCP) predicts that 38.6% of the Indian population will be living in urban areas in the next 13 years. The initiatives surrounding smart cities are developing into efficient and direct discourses to cultivate sustainable, inclusive, and accessible spaces.
The objectives are to be achieved either on an area-based development plan or via pan-city initiatives in which Smart Solutions are covering large parts of the city.
This is where the Geospatial Management Information System (GMIS) come into picture. GMIS is a web-based platform that is created with data from 100 cities and more than 7000 projects. This creates an extensive data repository of important mission-related data, introduces geospatial capabilities and creates a single engagement and monitoring platform for all officials involved in Smart Cities Mission implementation.
The application has potential to unlock a new way of managing and developing smart cities with evidence-based planning, project monitoring, and policy formulation.
Solution
The Geospatial Management Information System (GMIS) was formally launched in February 2021. The implementation plan involved the creation of the following modules in GMIS:
- Ranking Module – To track a city’s performance and benchmark other cities towards achieving the Smart City goals.
- Reports – Various reports can be generated for different cities on all ongoing projects, geo-tagged projects, updated projects, and active/ inactive projects.
- Vendor Repository Module – Provides a view of existing vendors and enables adding new vendors for different Smart City projects, providing transparency, ownership of projects and SLAs.
- City Progress Module – Provides visibility to the physical progress of the projects in a city.
The GMIS web application developed on Esri’s ArcGIS system facilitates evidence-based monitoring of the Smart City projects. Photos of the projects are uploaded on GMIS using a mobile app, which is configured on ArcGIS Survey123. Authorized personnel conduct surveys via the survey app to update project details and images and geo-tag.
The app is connected to the GMIS portal and synchronized with existing project IDs. This enhances the monitoring capabilities and transparency concerning all Smart Cities. GMIS enables monitoring of Smart City projects at the state and centre levels through geospatial dashboards providing details of the milestones achieved.
