Shared Infrastructure for Smart Cities
Published on : Friday 17-01-2020
Dhruvesh Sheth makes a case for shared infrastructure for smart cities for better aesthetics and cost considerations.
With increasing population, city planning and management has become the top priority for government today. Having said that, planning a city, which already has a booming population, becomes a critical and challenging task. The Indian government’s vision of 100 Smart Cities is a major leap in the improvement of the city as well as the quality of life.
Being in the smart city business for almost 4 years now, I realise that the most critical element is inter department work. Usually, most government ministries and departments work in silos and do not leverage the information and assets owned by them. Due to this gap, unnecessary infrastructure and additional costs are incurred. With the central government pushing for smart cities, the problem has reduced to a greater extent. The Smart City Committee is responsible for management of all government bodies and floating tenders for common infrastructure.
Despite the government making tremendous efforts towards smart cities, the problem is yet to be dealt with adequately. For example, walking around a city, one can usually notice that there are multiple poles for utilities such as light, camera, signal, variable message display or mobile tower at the same junction. In addition to these overlapping poles, there are multiple cables hanging overhead. A typical city junction is crowded with poles and hanging cables.
Actually, the government should create the basic infrastructure, which can be rented to utility service providers – that should be the mission for a smart city. This will not only help improve the aesthetics, but also benefit the government in monetary terms.
Another persistent challenge in today’s smart city planning is that of limited application of mind and technology. Though the committee is formed on the basis of qualifications, due to technology moving at 10x speed, keeping up with it is getting difficult. If we look at any project that has been executed or is in the implementation stage over the last 5 years, we will see that only traditional technology is being implemented. For example, all committees in India prefer to have data centres on premise just because they feel data is safe only in close proximity to them. We are in 2020, and the age of cyber-crime is at its peak. It really does not matter where your data is, or how heavily guarded it is; it can be leaked from anywhere. In doing so, we are only spending more money on setting up the data centre and furthermore in maintaining it. If government opts to move on to cloud or a shared infrastructure, there will be savings.
Today, all projects are funded through taxpayers' money, and it is essential we try and save it in whatever way we can. The money saved here could be spent on training courses for the committee so that they stay abreast with the latest technology and implement the best available in the market. India still has a long way to go; however, work started is work half done. We should not stop investing in these projects because they are aimed at benefitting the citizen. A good starting point is optimisation of available resources to get the best results.
Dhruvesh Sheth is a Project Management & Strategy professional associated with a leading system integrator in India. He has had extensive exposure in the field of Smart Cities, having been part of two smart city projects.
