Wipro chief Azim Premji said on Saturday that the implementation of the Smart Cities project in India, unfortunately, has been shallow, despite catching a lot of attention from Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Premji said this in an interaction with students at the celebrations of Wipro’s 2016 earthian awards.
The Smart Cities mission is one of the flagship programmes of the NDA government, which was announced on June 25, 2015. However, the company has been actively participating in terms of providing IT solutions for the project, Premji said. “We have been actively participating in the implementation process of the Smart Cities project by providing IT and lighting solutions,” he said. Premji said per capita income of the people is mostly taken as a parameter to gauge the developed status of a country, but there are many qualitative aspects which get ignored.
He said the quality of education system and social values are the criteria to gauge the developed status of any country.
“Some countries are less developed, but their education system is of high quality, and some others are very developed but, they have very low quality education system. So, education is an important criteria for development and lack of development,” he said.
“There are very many developed nations which have social values that are significantly inferior, so this is also a criteria for gauging the developed status of any country,” he said.
On energy consumption and utility, Premji said alternative energy like hydro and green energies should be used than using coal-based energy.
“More green energy should be used, instead of using coal-based energy. Hydro energy also could be used, which is done scientifically and not at the cost of environment,” he said.
Premji said rural development has to be at the grassroots level and has to involve local population. As far as the company’s role in rural development is concerned, Premji said it is doing a lot of work including financing NGOs to take up developmental works in villages.
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