India’s Smart City Challenge: By Next Week First Winner Will Be Announced

The first winners of India’s Smart City Challenge will be announced next week, as part of prime minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious plans to transform urban life.

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In the final days of India’s first Smart City Challenge – an endeavour both ambitious and suspect – consultants just wanted the whole thing done with. As the December deadline for submissions approached, they crisscrossed the country holding on to nearly finished plans and proposals for the cities they had been assigned just two months earlier.

Their documents evoked those familiar, romantic overtures of urban development: constant electricity and an endless flow of water, cyclists with their own avenues, renewed rivers and promenades for families to enjoy each evening, and streetlights that sensed when they were needed. The effects would be felt far beyond the limited geography of each smart city, the consultants thought.

Pashim Tiwari, an urban planner working with the All India Institute of Local Self-Government, was among those who sensed change. The 98-year-old organisation had been assigned two prospective smart cities in the state of Haryana, and two in Chhattisgarh. Tiwari was in charge of the projects. With barely two weeks left until the deadline, he knew his way around government offices – armed guards would step aside when he approached the cabins of powerful officials. When the team’s senior members went home now and then, their wives would reintroduce them to their children. (Source Gaurdian.com)

If we review these  infographics then we can interpret what are the major requirements to setup the smart city.

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“City managers have become more aware of their cities. Most weren’t aware of the strengths and weaknesses – now, for the first time, this kind of thinking is getting institutionalised,” Tiwari said thoughtfully one morning in Bilaspur, one of the two smart city prospects in Chhattisgarh. “Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

Tiwari had arrived in Bilaspur from New Delhi early that December morning, wearing a sweater. The temperature outside was 30C. His eyes were glassy, and his cough was in no way helped by the coal dust carried into the city by slow winds. At the town’s municipal headquarters, Tiwari spent his waking hours creating the town’s smart city proposal with a team of young planners. “They aren’t jaded by city policies yet,” he grinned. (Source Gaurdian)

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Tiwari believes that smart cities could fix the problems of regular cities. “The city can now run as a public limited company,” he said, happily. “When you look at a city that way, the moment the valuation increases, municipal bonds become a reality. I’ll give you an example: city surveillance is amazingly viable in larger towns. If you have houses paying a small amount, you could have enough cameras to have an effective city surveillance network. And not one handled by the government, but by private companies.”

Like every other consultant vying for the government’s approval, Tiwari had followed the rules and was preparing two plans for each of his cities. One detailed the ideas and budgets for a small area within the city; the other was an invisible technological grid laid over the entire city. Tiwari’s team proposed a bespoke, city-wide digital operating system: “It will have electricity, water, healthcare, birth-death, credit card data, traffic licensing, penalties,” he said. “As a city official, if dengue season is approaching, you’ll get alerts reminding you that you have to put out particular tenders.”

Tiwari believes that, eventually, everybody will come to see the benefit of living in a “smart area”, and be willing to pay for it. He described a world where all the city’s residents, from slum residents to the occupants of penthouses, could use services online – where electrical connections were easy to procure, and all kinds of payments could be made by phone or at a kiosk. A world of blissful information technology. “We realised that even in slums, people will pay nominally more for improved services. [With our system] everyone is able to access any resource if he is able to pay for it. Every citizen has the opportunity to access data for his survival and upliftment.”

With the report of Rahul Bhatia we can interpret the pressure to have the smart city design proposal is enormous but what really the people of cities which prospects as smart city needs.  The living standards, the way of taking the thoughts, culture, tradition, society in which they are living, how it will get affect with the smart city. Do they have money to acquired land in those smart city?

As per the report of Rahul Bhatia he met with a man in Bilaspur , he shared the following:

“During Indira Gandhi’s time, they promised us a bridge here. They’ve ignored this place for so long, and now we’ve heard they’re breaking everything.”

It is being well understandable without the effort of the people and government any smart city proposals will be nightmare.  Such development can be more workable when people will have good standards of living and government required to place plan to backing up the people shelter, food and earning during working on smart city development.

The decision process

The question about technology’s dominance in smart cities is surely the tip of a deeper concern: who decides what a city’s priorities should be? In 1992, an amendment to India’s constitution devolved power to city governments. People affected by city life, the thinking went, should have a say in city affairs.

The urban ministry’s approach to smart cities swings the other way. “The cities programme nudges us toward information technology, rather than local government,” said Pavan Srinath, the head of policy research at the Takshashila Institution. Sensing that the mission to create smart cities was an important moment in urban governance, Srinath has led the thinktank’s study of the endeavour from 2014: “You have to ask, is the smart cities mission furthering local government, or putting a spanner in it?

“I think, for a city like New York, where problems have been solved, putting sensors on sewage pipes is a wonderful idea. For India … ” his voice trailed off, leaving scepticism to fill the void. “I think what the conversation needs to be about is what is smart for your city, for your area.”

Are we really looking for technology? Where the the electricity wire, drainage system are not in well managed form.  Smart city development required good workforce and high will power to be accomplished. When we read about these reports we can understand how the government  need the support of people to get this done.

We can read more on it here:

http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/how-can-india-make-smart-cities-a-reality

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jan/22/inside-story-india-smart-city-gold-rush-it