In Pursuit of Smartness

Creating smart cities is one of Government of India’s (GOI) prime initiatives to make technology accessible to its citizens, with a proposal to cover 100 cities from 2015 to 2020. Since its launch, the smart city has emerged as a buzzword in India.

The smart city mission has emerged as a buzzword in India ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi outlined his vision for creating a hundred smart cities. However, the mission has so far faced several challenges leading to not so impressive progress. Read on to discover the opportunities for channel partners and solution providers while we analyze the reasons for not-so-smart growth

By Amit Singh

Why are smart cities essential?

Cities are the engines of economic growth. The GOI’s policy think-tank, the National Institution for Transforming India (Niti Aayog), predicted that the urbanization rate in India would increase to over 60 percent in the next 30 years, assuming the rate of economic growth at 7-9 percent.

By some estimates, urban areas are expected to house 40 percent of India’s population and contribute 75 percent of India’s GDP by 2030; driven by migration of people from rural areas for better employment opportunities and economic prospects.

This indicates the scale of the challenge at hand. How can any authority possibly keep up with the ever-increasing demand on its finite resources for clean drinking water, assured electricity, affordable housing, inexpensive smart transportation, access to clean toilets, and good governance to more and more people?

The way forward for cities is to be resilient and adaptable. Every city needs to ensure a better quality of life for citizens by smartly adopting technology on all fronts: from its services and governance mechanisms to its interactions with citizens. World over, cities have realized this, and hence the impetus for smart cities.

What’s there for IT solution providers?

With an expansive agenda involving extensive planning of land use, inclusive housing, viable transport options, citizen-friendly governance, improved utilities, and sustainable economic development, technology will play a pivotal role in successful development of smart cities.

As per estimates from industry experts, the IT opportunity is being projected at around $25 million per city. According to Nasscom, the government’s initiative can create a business opportunity of over $30-40 billion for the IT sector over the next 5-10 years.

While the smart city projects are being taken up by large integrators and infrastructure providers due to size and financial restrictions, smaller IT partners and solution providers have a large scope to position themselves for point-based solutions. “Large SIs and infrastructure providers like Honeywell and L&T are outsourcing the large chunk of IT solution provisioning and implementation to small IT partners. In fact, we are seeing large interest from the smaller partners to offer unique solutions for these infrastructure projects. Many of the ISVs are building solutions on IoT platforms. Hence, the opportunity for them is large,” explains Som Satsangi Managing Director, HPE.

With 100 smart cities across the country in various phases of development, solution providers are seeing increasing opportunities in smart city projects. “We are seeing huge opportunities in areas like city surveillance, command and control centers, IoT solutions, traffic management system, and solid waste management solutions. In fact, command and control center development is currently the highest growth area,” states Peeyush Vibhakar, Managing Director, Insight Business Machines.

The company is executing various smart city projects for cities like Mumbai, Nagpur, Hyderabad, Vizag, and Raipur. For Mumbai, it has established command and control center and data center for city surveillance at Rs 45 crore. For Nagpur, it is setting up 100 kiosks for Rs 15 crore at public places to provide public information on various government schemes.

Command and control center

Industry experts are recognizing Smart City Centers (SCC) i.e. command and control centers as the largest opportunity inside the smart city. SCC functions as a city’s nervous system where digital technologies are integrated with social, physical, and environmental aspects of the city, to enable centralized monitoring and decision making.

SCCs have already been set up in 10 cities (Naya Raipur, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Surat, Pune, Nagpur, Rajkot, Visakhapatnam, Kakinada, and Bhopal) with an approximate investment of Rs 1200 crore. Thirteen other cities have started work on setting up such centers, and another 32 are at an advanced stage of pre-work preparation.

In the SCC architecture, IoT devices like sensors, GPS equipment, and cameras located at the front-end (trash bins, vehicles, streets, poles etc.) collect and transmit data through a communication network to a central facility. “Applications then convert the data and information received into insights, which further facilitates a decision support system. The SCC thus enables real-time monitoring and expeditious incident response management in city operations,” shares Yogesh Godbole, Director, Ace Brain Systems and Software.

He adds that command and control center offers a great opportunity for solution providers with higher margins. “Command and control center development requires high technical skills to develop an intelligent platform with the combination of analytics and software applications. In fact, creating a turn-key solution gives you an edge and ability to command higher margins from large infrastructure integrators.”

Further, global technology vendors like HPE, Cisco, Schneider Electric, and IBM are actively participating in the development of command and control centers. HPE grabbed the contract to build India’s first cloud-based integrated command and control center (ICCC), to run several city command center operations in parallel across seven cities including Gwalior, Bhopal, Indore, and Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh. “We are building the ICCC on our universal IoT platform and will be rolled out within a year. We are also enabling our partners to develop various point solutions for Smart cities,” adds Satsangi of HPE.

In addition, Schneider Electric, in partnership with IL&FS, recently delivered integrated command and control center along with utility management system (electrical and water SCADA) and intelligent building management system (BMS) for Naya Raipur in Chhattisgarh.

City surveillance

Surveillance has turned out to be the area where largest progress has been observed across the smart cities in India. In fact, city surveillance is being looked upon as a prime tool in improving the security apparatus of a city.

Smart cities including Mumbai, Pune, Surat, Nagpur, Bhubaneswar, and Jaipur are already installing CCTV cameras for effective city surveillance and are adopting a command and control system.

“The smart city initiative, where over 100 cities are to be developed for better connectivity and security, is expected to drive India’s video surveillance market over the next six years,” says Manoj Bisht, CEO, MK Infosystems.

At the same time, surveillance is not just about security in smart cities. It is being utilized in providing more advanced public services like traffic control and management. “Whether it is for better security or for public services, it is undeniable that high-definition video surveillance systems, including cameras, sensors, location-based apps, and services, which collect information from and about the cities will increase and play a critical role in enabling smart cities,” details Bisht.

However, security experts claim that just installing cameras is not enough. The cities still have a long way to go, as far as security planning is concerned. There is still no coherent blueprint for surveillance and there is a lack of unified vision for the emergency response system in case of any possible threat. Cities require smart analytics which can be used to get the real-time data to give timely warning to the concerned authorities.

“Currently we are lacking standards on both the duration, coverage area and the quality of surveillance recording. CCTV surveillance is being implemented without keeping in mind any minimum standards. There are no standards in place with regards to CCTV surveillance for smart cities yet,” highlights Rajesh Mehta, Managing Director, Geo Integrators.

IoT opportunity

IoT along with solutions like smart lighting, traffic, parking, waste, and water management have been regarded as another huge opportunity for channel partners. In fact, IoT is evolving on a massive scale with the rise of low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) technologies like NB-IoT and LoRa, and innovative IoT platforms to cost-efficiently control thousands or millions of simple, low usage connected devices.

“Internet of things is like a neuron which spreads all across the city and senses the beats of the city. IoT transmits data to the command and control center where human-based analysis, as well as machine analysis, help to respond to the need of the city and its citizens,” describes Amit Singh, Director, PwC India, which is one of the consultants for the smart city projects.

A recent Intel-backed study estimates that smart cities would save up to 125 hours of every urban resident each year and this can be done by providing them smart solutions such as smart parking, smart traffic management, smart health management, smart waste management, and smart mobility. These solutions based on IoT can ease their life with all information just one digital touch away.

IoT is already transforming many smart cities in India by connecting remote sensors with smart solutions. Consider smart meters that are capable of reading individual water consumption in real time and preventing wastage by detecting leaks and shutting off the water supply remotely. “Using the internet of things (IoT) concept, which allows remote monitoring over the internet, smart meters can be used to analyse a water treatment system and remotely monitor the quality of tap water, detect the amount of leakage or waste thrown into the river and even monitor water level variations in reservoirs,” shares Jaimin Patel, Director, E-Connect Solutions.

The Udaipur-based solution provider has developed a plug and play water information management system on Yokogawa’s SCADA platform. The company is bidding for the water management project in Bhopal and for grievances management system in Ahmedabad smart city.

Results speak for themselves

Although a majority of the smart city projects are still in various phases of implementation, few impressive results are being observed at some locations.

According to a senior central government official, on condition of anonymity, the crime rate has reduced by 18 percent over the past two quarters as on April 2018 in Rajkot. There is also an improvement in traffic challan issuance, indicating a behavioral change. Monitoring of cleaning work through CCTV camera has led to the reduction in instances of littering, urination in public, and burning of garbage. In Kakinada, environment sensors have been deployed for automatic weather monitoring, air quality monitoring, and lightning detection.

Pune has installed flood sensors at key points around the city, which feed data to the SCC, enabling timely warning and response mechanism. Emergency call boxes have been installed at 120 locations to contact the nearest police station with just the press of a button. In Ahmedabad, free Wi-Fi on BRTS corridors has increased ridership by 20,000 in March 2018, compared to Feb 2018. In Vishakhapatnam, CCTV and GPS enabled buses are being tracked online. Bhopal has seen a rise in its property tax collections and is also able to track its transport services online.

In addition, Surat became the first Indian city to develop command and control center to monitor street activities by tapping into state and national surveillance grids. To improve the existing process of tracking citizen requests, Surat created an e-application system that allows the public to view the status of their submissions. Since the city project’s inception, Surat has lowered the crime rate by 27 percent in surveillance zones, with enhanced traffic management, improved police response time, and increased transparency on the status of public requests.

Further, Bhubaneswar has started with state-of-the-art adaptive signals with built-in cameras on its arterial Janpath Road. The system not only monitors truant drivers for breaking signals, but its built-in sensors also talk to other signals on the road to smartly manage traffic.

The way forward

The transition to establishing or retrofitting smart cities is paved with several challenges. One of the major challenges includes the need for financial backing. In addition, cities need to invest in guidance from experts who have already overseen such transitions in other parts of the world.

“Financing is a major hurdle in developing smart cities as budget allocations are insufficient for projects of this magnitude. In addition, major challenge lies in retrofitting existing legacy city infrastructures to make them smart,” highlights Anil Kadam, General Manager, Solutions Architect, Schneider Electric.

Further, IT solution providers face multitude of procedural challenges. “We suggest making the RFPs more clearly based on past experiences. In addition, the government shall improve the payment cycles in order to improve the financial management of the projects. Currently, it takes almost 6-9 months to receive the payments after completion of any phase, which derails the financial management,” advises Vibhakar of Insight.

In addition, as many channel partners complain of lower margins in smart city projects, Godbole of Ace Brain suggests them to create their own IP or solutions. “Partners can command margins only if they offer a unique solution for the projects. In fact, they need to invest in developing systems and resources and will reap benefits in about 2-3 years as the smart city space matures.”

Most importantly, any proposed roadmap will hinge on collaboration between the central, state and local authorities, which could prove to be a complex juggling act. These agencies will need to work together to provide clearances in a timely manner, enabled by online processes.