Shaped by smartness: A new tryst with urbanscapes

How smart are we being while looking at setting up smart cities in a cultural context even as we face the ever-widening gap between governance and delivery? How will they fit into uniquely Indian requirements, our fragmented cultural ethos?

The Narendra Modi government’s initiatives to set up 100 smart cities throws open enormous opportunities for a young breed of technocrats to do wonders with new urbanscapes and innovation on the go.

Smart cities are places where technology plays a major role in delivering citizen-centric governance.

The governance will ensure wider citizen participation in decision-making via online voting, referendum, programme implementation, monitoring mechanisms, measuring project progress and implications.

Deliverables include services like electricity, water, sanitation and recycling, ensuring 24/7 water supply, traffic and transport system that work on data analytics to provide efficient solutions to ease commuting, automated surveillance and building security systems, Wi-Fi connectivity, houses that ensures high-speed connectivity, the works.

India’s cities evolved in a well defined trajectory out of religious foundations, and under colonial rule, inter-city trade became a springboard to spurring new levels of urban growth.

In the post-Independence period, massive government investments in PSUs and research establishments played a major role in further evolving cities. But the post-liberalisation era since 1991 brought a paradigm shift to the cityscape propelled by weakening of agricultural activity and emergence of manufacturing along with services.

Migration with its cultural and spatial conflicts brought intensified the chaos gripping India’s urban spaces.

Says Centre for Excellence in Urban Governance Chairperson at IIM Bangalore, Gopal Naik: “Urban life in India is deteriorating and we need to address this. One way to do this is to create smart cities. In fact, in some sense we do not have many options.” .

Why smart cities?

With India’s urban population predicted to reach 590 million by 2030 and most of them staying in at least 60 cities, the government might need an investment of $1.2 trillion to upgrade urban infrastructure.

Schneider Electric Infrastructure Limited Managing Director and Vice-President Prakash Chandraker supports the Modi-led government’s plan.

"Smart technology solutions can optimise key infrastructure and reduce complexity to improve efficiency of such cities. Smart cities are the right way forward in promoting urbanisation across India, since they leave a lower carbon footprint  and higher efficiency through integration and coordination of various infrastructure services. Against this backdrop, we are looking forward to providing smart city solutions," he said.

The scope to do more with technologies and innovation via technical integration for real-time interconnected data through open platforms is indeed high.

“There are smart city solutions for virtually every public utility which can help save up to 30 per cent energy, reduce water consumption by 15 per cent and travel time by up to 20 per cent," Chandraker said.

Gopal Naik notes that the competitiveness of an economy should be based on knowledge capital, social capital, environmental capital and physical capital in order to be sustainable. “This is what smart cities are all about," he says.

The trajectory from an agrarian economy to an industrialised one is notable in the case of a city like Coimbatore. Agriculture activity has flourished around Coimbatore, and units for agri-related ancillary industries manufacturing pumpsets and other agricultural equipment have mushroomed by the hundreds in the city’s exurbs.

Capital raised from agrarian activity has helped local entrepreneurs raise funds for their ventures which have expanded to servicing the automobile and ancillary industries.

"Here, we should understand that cities should not be built, instead they should emerge. Urbanisation should evolve from the growth that is happening from below and the capital generated from that area.

So agriculture can play a pivotal role in this shift to industrialisation and such cities can logically evolve into smart cities," says professor at the National Institute of Advance Studies Narendar Pani.

The ‘satellite city’ experiment in India was a crashing flop. “Kengeri satellite city, bordering Bangalore, visualised during the eighties was a failure. Rather than structuring the city, we should give primacy to the economic aspect, giving a livelihood for its citizens.

We have to make them cost-competitive so that they produce world-class products which can compete with other cities,” Pani says.

Given the deficiencies in basic amenities like clean drinking water, sanitation, public transport and lighting facilities plaguing India’s cities, going in for high-tech solutions off the bat will not work.

Citizen participation and involvement will be key differentiators. Building greater civic sense and educating residents on their role in ensuring overall liveability in the city and its management will be critical success factors for any initiative to be successful.

Cost-competitiveness

Cost-competitiveness of smart cities will be another factor to reckon with. Cheap capital, labour, infrastructure and resources will help manufacturing and service sector growth.

“Unlike China, India can’t compel its rural workforce to stay in smart cities and work in the manufacturing sector. So providing cheaper labour is challenging,” Pani says.

Taking into account the unique nature of each city, Pani advocates evolving different models with intense application of world class technologies to make smart cities cost-competitive.

"Cities can be developed through the engineering approach and the diagnostic approach. In the former, we have to start from the scratch. But in the latter, we have a living system where we intervene and come up with some changes,” he said.

“Since Indian cities are famous for steep rise in real estate costs, we should have a land bank system so that land can be assessed and availed for industrial and development purposes systematically,” Pani says.

Mantri Developers Chairman and Managing Director Sushil Mantri says, “The government should opt for a public-private partnership model without burdening the exchequer.The government can play the role of facilitator by providing land, water, power etc., while actual development of urban infrastructure can be left to private players.”

Mantri says initiating projects such as this would not only address the increased demand for real estate and urban infrastructure, but also spur employment growth driven by rapid urbanisation.

“The government will have a huge role to play in the entire process by providing single window clearances which can help projects get off the ground quickly, thereby, bringing overall costs down for these projects.”

Puravankara Projects Limited Group CEO Jackbastian Nazareth says that acquiring land, building infrastructure, fusing local and international know-how, assembling the right financing structures and putting together key partnerships between private, public and community are equally challenging.

“Private sector participation along with the government on an equal basis will usher efficiency into operations and counter interruptions in execution in these projects,” Nazareth says.

If India is to move 250-300 million more people into urban spaces over the next two decades, it needs to build 700-900 million sq metres of commercial and residential space each year — or, more than two Mumbais every year.

Questions of connectivity

Smart projects are already being fleshed out from their bare bones in Ahmedabad-Dholera Investment Region of Gujarat, and Shendra-Bidkin Industrial Park city and Dighi Port Industrial Area, both in Maharashtra.

An overriding digital infrastructure will be necessary to broaden customer interfaces and facilitate better service delivery.

Last-mile connectivity with robust thorough ICT infrastructure can bring in real social change, Cisco in India Chief of Staff — Smart+Connected Communities, and Executive Director for Globalisation Angshik Chaudhuri says.

His company is expected to play an active role in setting up high-end communication infrastructure for upcoming smart cities.

"Investing in these smart cities with the collaborative efforts of a young and aspiring population and supportive digital platforms providing citizen-centric amenities can help us reap the dividends of urbanisation," Chaudhuri says.

The Narendra Modi-led government’s first budget has made its intentions clear on putting in place efficient infrastructure.

Smart cities can be planned as hubs of economic activity and bustling socio-economic spaces powered by manufacturing and services creating a beneficial cycle of job creation, concomitant growth and renewed investments.

While the government has allotted Rs 7,500 crore to smart cities in the current Budget, clarity on how it conceives the idea and its implementation is yet to emerge — a choice between the greenfield or brownfield approaches for one.

Or, a PPP model. Finding the right balance between policy, imagination and implementation will be crucial even as we lay the first building blocks of a hopefully smart (or even existential) urban future. Who knows, it may evolve into a bigger and more “inclusive developmental” model than we expect to see right now.