Smart moves for smart cities

With overpopulated cities and their strained infrastructure, India is already in the midst of a crisis. Given the country’s population growth and unchecked migration to urban areas, the path ahead looks even more difficult. To get a perspective on the massive challenge ahead for India, let’s look at some statistics: According to the World Bank, almost 10 mn people migrate from rural to urban areas in India every year. Further, by 2020, 70% of people will be living in cities.

As the urban population swells, there will be greater demands on the already strained city infrastructures, which in turn will impact vital services such as transportation, healthcare, education, and public safety. To this end, the concept of smart cities can truly prove path-breaking in changing the face of the country. No wonder, conceptualization and creation of smart cities is high on the agenda for Indian government, which has earmarked an investment of Rs 50,000 crore for the development of 100 smart cities.

TECHNOLOGY CENTRAL TO REALIZING THE SMART CITY DREAM
For a city to be smart and connected, the first requirement is for a new-age broadband infrastructure which would include cable, optical fiber, and wireless network. It should have the capacity to meet the network usage requirements of entire populace of the city. With an increasing number of devices getting connected to the Internet, termed Internet of Things and in the wake of ever increasing use of mobile applications, having a best in class broadband infrastructure would enable citizens to access smart city applications as per their requirements.

An important step would be to make sure that smart devices and sensors are embedded in the infrastructure of the city. These devices would provide the city administration with the realtime data, alerts, and analytics along with a rich experience to the citizens - Vineet Kshirsagar, Senior Director & Group Head Businesses, Oracle

Vineet Kshirsagar, Senior Director & Group Head Businesses, Oracle believes, “An important step would be to make sure that smart devices and sensors are embedded in the infrastructure of the city. These devices would provide the city administration with the real-time data, alerts, and analytics along with a rich experience to the citizens. This collective intelligence would also assist in connecting the citizens of the city and the city administration. The real-time data and analytics would be critical for health, judicial, police, fire, and many more administrative departments, thus keeping crimes and public grievances at bay.” Another important step would be the development of smart urban areas, which would use ICT technologies in an innovative manner to benefit the environment and economy. These areas would offer Wi-Fi spots, charging points for electric cars, buildings with smart cooling/heating systems, and information kiosks.

PLETHORA OF OPPORTUNITIES

To help make the GoI’s smart city dream a reality, solution providers across the ecosystem are gearing up with offerings that can come together to create a connected and collaborative environment  —Satish Jadhav, Director - IOT, Embedded Sales Group - South Asia, Intel Technology

With the buzz for smart cities gaining traction, it has opened up abundance of opportunities for technology players and service providers to develop technologies that are able to satisfy the evolving requirements of the stakeholders involved.

Right from providing and setting up the right infrastructure for the last mile connectivity, providing the right technology to enable better governance and access to services, and ensuring that all components for the decided solution work seamlessly, there is an opportunity at every stage - Raman Bountra, Business Leader, Government Sales, Dell India

Echoing similar sentiments, Rajeev Saxena, Director sales, India Public Sector, Commercial and Saarc, NetApp Marketing & Services says, “Smart city ecosystem has a host of opportunities, to start with installation of sensors and dashboard that will help reduce energy while managing waste collection, analytics to measure carbon footprint, and charging for electric vehicles.”

Sensing the immense opportunity, service providers have upped their ante and are devising strategies and developing solutions to gain their share of smart city pie. “To help make the GoI’s Smart Cities dream a reality, solution providers across the ecosystem are gearing up with offerings that can come together to create a connected and collaborative
environment,” states Satish Jadhav, Director - IoT, Embedded Sales Group - South Asia, Intel Technology.

A major player which is aggressively targeting smart cities opportunity is Wipro. “We are offering end-to-end IT solutions for smart cities right from utility management to a
centralized command and control center for pollution monitoring - Anuj Bhalla, Vice President and Global BU Head - Product, System Integration and Maintenance Service, Wipro.

The company is also offering smart healthcare systems, including remote cardiac and fetal monitoring, fall detection, and online patient information storage systems.

As connectivity underpins many aspects of the smart city concept, IoT is emerging as the biggest area of interest for technology providers. Various devices like sensors, gateways, communication infrastructure, and servers collectively form the ‘Internet of Things’ and will be critical in shaping the future of smart cities. According to Cisco’s estimates, the value at stake as businesses digitize over the next 10 years is $394.4 bn for the private sector and $116.2 bn for the public sector.

“Given that the IoT is the foundation on which most smart cities are built, this is also an area of opportunity for service providers,” asserts Bountra of Dell India. Consequently, leading companies are devising strategies to tap the IoT opportunity in smart cities. “IoT is one of Intel’s fastest growing businesses and we are building on our long and successful history in the embedded market by delivering platform level solutions with integrated, scalable hardware, software and services for intelligent devices and gateways, while also enabling end-to-end analytics to turn big data into actionable information,” informs Jadhav.

Similarly, Cisco has announced a strategic engagement with Electronics City Industries Association (ELCIA) to develop Asia’s first end-to-end ‘IoT Innovation Hub’ in Bengaluru. Cisco is using the network as a platform to transform physical communities to connected communities run on networked information.

We are working with global and local partners on solutions to address public safety, traffic management, citywide wired and wireless networked Internet access, smart parking, remote access to government agency services, and a host of other urban services -  Purushottam Kaushik, Managing Director, Cisco India and Saarc

Among other technologies, big data and analytics will clearly play a major role to drive the growth in the smart city journey. However, more clarity will come as smart city framework and standards are evolved. Air Vice Marshal Dattatray Pande AVSM, CSM (Retd), Vice President Government, Defence and Aerospace, Persistent Systems opines, “Big data and analytics will play a pivotal role in ensuring a check on unauthorized usage or wastage of essential resources needed in day-to-day activities like water, electricity, etc. To offer best services to its residents, the proposed smart cities will have to focus on automation of operations including asset management, property management, maintenance management, visitor management, facility booking, space management, tenant
billing, etc.”

With respect to this, Persistent is building an open source platform for smart cities. Persistent believes that the smart city platform should be open standard, cloud based,
and fundamentally aiming to break the silos of independent services in the city.
Another big opportunity lies in integrating Geographi cal Information System (GIS) in the smart city framework. “Location is a common denominator in every aspect of smart city and hence a location platform, ie, a GIS-based platform technology has to form the backbone since the very beginning including the planning for ICT deployment,” opines Agendra Kumar, President, Esri India. A centralized information system based on GIS will provide an IT framework which will integrate every aspect of a smart city—starting from conceptualization, planning, and development to maintenance. Esri, for example, is working with governments and private organizations in India to help them in setting up enterprise GIS technology platform. A good example is GIFT city (Gujarat International Finance Tech City). In GIFT city, GIS is used in benchmarking of master plan, 3D visualization for urban skyline, geometric network of power utility, and landscape management. Also, GIS software helps in providing a secure workplace through CCTV live feed for surveillance.

SECURITY IS AN ESSENTIAL ASPECT
As the vision of digital transformation takes shape, security needs to be considered as an integral part of the plan. As systems grow more complex, become interconnected, and start handling more information, their exposure to vulnerabilities increases—whether due to malicious intent or human error. Smart cities can securely thrive and prosper if  cybersecurity and information security are taken as fundamental components in the smart city blueprint. With a stringent cybersecurity framework, the need of the hour is to build a skilled taskforce to combat complex cyberattacks. Symantec is making huge strides in the area by partnering with Nasscom to train and certify world-class professionals with the requisite cybersecurity skills.

Technology vendors are also providing solutions to support security of connected systems. For example, Avaya has introduced SDN Fx solution for ensuring security in smart cities. Using this technology, the company has demonstrated nearly 15,000 cameras running over a single converged infrastructure with one protocol.

CROSSING THE HURDLES
Like the opportunities, the challenges for developing smart cities are also humongous. Implementation of smart city solutions is a complex process. “City governments face challenges in terms of cost, time, obsolescence of technology, and of course the biggest challenge is from where to start,” explains Neeraj Gill, General Manager – Public Sector, Microsoft India. India is a diverse country that has witnessed rapid urbanization over the past few years and hence, there is no single solution that can be applied across the country to make it smart.
To address and enhance security as part of a smart city initiative, many devices such as cameras, sensors, wearables, etc, need to be deployed. Saxena of NetApp says, “A smart city should be able to provide top-class infrastructure, transportation, energy utilities, and security that need to be smarter and driven by technology and automated processes.”
Apart from this, other challenges that could come up during the processs include social and cultural change taking longer time than expected; poor understanding of open source platforms; unavailability of smart city standards and detailed ICT roadmap, and so on.

OUTLOOK
The wave of urbanization that is sweeping across India represents one of the country’s greatest opportunities as well as one of its most serious challenges. Over the past few years, service providers have invested in the smart city space to make their offerings more relevant to city challenges and are coming up with different solutions each passing day. However, success of smart cities initiative will also revolve around other factors.

Different cities have started implementing smart city initiatives in bits and pieces and these will eventually coalesce to accomplish a larger and insatiable objective  - Khwaja Saifuddin, Senior Director - South Asia, Middle East and Africa, WD

While technology and data will play an important role in solving some of the critical issues, the success will ultimately depend upon the most accurate assessment of the current and future needs of the city and mapping the fulfilment of those needs with the most competent solution providers.”