Er. Sonakshi Gupta
In this era of technical advancements, the concept of Smart Cities is fast gaining importance. Smart cities start with smart systems that work for the benefit of both the public and the environment. Throughout history, cities have served as centres of innovation, advancement, civilization, and as facilitators of the social interaction necessary for the progress of mankind. Information Technology is the basis for providing vital services to the public and to ensure the development of smart cities. In 2009, International Business Machines (IBM) came up with the idea of smart cities when the world was facing an economic crisis, so this idea didn’t get the boost at that time. To provide better access to our daily necessities and to ensure proper connectivity and services like monitoring of gas and water distribution systems, online grief redressed systems, intelligent traffic monitoring, and smart parking and optimized energy consumption, the solution is the development of smart cities. US based smart city council operates in 140 countries with the aid of number of experts and agencies. Indian Government has envisaged developing 100 cities as smart cities. In the first phase 20 cities have been have chosen under the project and in coming two years 40 cities each will be identified for development as smart cities. A combination of connected hardware, software, and metering facilitates integration and collaboration between systems and networks. The challenges involved in such a project are enormous that not only requires infrastructure development but also trained manpower to build, operate and maintain intelligent systems.
India has an enormous increase in its population from last few decades. This increase has created rise in the various problems because people from rural areas are migrating to urban areas in order to cater to their needs. Cities roughly experience 31% of India’s population. This has lead to the formation of messy, complex view of cities. Cities have become the backbone of everyone’s survival. Cities are suffering from hazardous issues like: – difficulty in managing waste, water pollution, deteriorating lands for industrialization. Studies prove that native land forests are disappearing at the rate of 2.7% per year due to industrialization. As, people are migrating to cities it becomes a challenge to design some framework or construct some methodologies for making India a developed country. Term “Smart Cities” is used to eradicate the problems faced by people .Concept of smart cities focuses on e-governance, smart water management, infrastructure, heath management etc. No doubt, concepts are new, innovative, challenging but they merely focuses on improving the quality of life for citizens today and even in future too. By this concept, around 2030 India will add 500 million to its 2011 urban population of 37 million. Management, people, governance, rules or policies, technology, infrastructure, economy, natural habitat are the eight critical factors on which concept of smart cities are based.
Focusing factors of smart cities
Working on the concept of smart cities towards smart nation; various adaptive, different pair of factors should be considered.
* Management
Management plays an important role in design strategy of smart cities. As, management leads to proper establishment of organization and further to increased productivity. But, this is the only point which suffers a lot due to various challenges.
Challenges, Policies, Lack of goals, Clear vis-ions, Project area & size, Size of team matters, Behaviour, Well IT skilled professionals, Changing location, Mandatory for business increase
* People
People and communities are the building blocks of the smart cities on which main focus is being made. Smart cities are working for the communities, which comprises of various types of people. Every person has their different needs, so understanding his needs becomes an important part. Management can only work if needs of community are clear.
* Governance and Authorities
Governance refers to the monitoring of laws, rules and regulations of area which leads to the high productivity and improves the quality of service, life of people. Communication between delivery holders, exchange of data, proper and efficient usage of material, leadership are the parameters that are being monitored.
* Rules or Policies
Rules and policies are required for breaking the chains of laws and moving smoothly. Policies at city level, state level, central level matters a lot for efficient functioning of concepts. Smart cities also faced and are facing same problems; therefore various organizations have been made to monitor the policies and make them formulated in the minimum span of time.
* Technology
Now, comes the key feature or the root for every advancement. This is an era of technology, where everything’s success depends upon new and innovative ideas. “Smart Computing” is the term referred to as the upcoming generation of software, IT solutions, intelligent systems and reducing the cost of labor.
* Infrastructure
Many standards have to be met for smart city concept to be successfully implemented. Having a perfect infrastructure is a mandatory part. Smart infrastructure (like: Wi-Fi enabled buildings, RF based home monitoring systems, motion sensors, voice recognition etc.) encourage the employees to work in that environment.
* Economy
All the concepts are only possible if and only if economical support is there from backend. This concept of smart cities has been opted by many developed countries since 1990’s, but lagged behind in India because of lack of economical support. But now it’s being boosted up because of high economical support.
* Natural Habitat
Smart cities will not only work on e-devices or smart managing systems but also will depend on natural resources such as: protection of water, proper sewage systems, natural parks designing and many more things.
Advancements towards smart cities
Much technological advancement has been made and is being done in order to achieve the goals for smart cities. Prime Minister Narendra Modi took an initiative towards the innovate concept of smart cities. His launch of 3 huge and mega urban policies: mission on smart cities, AMRUT (Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation) and housing for all urban areas; enabled the standards of better living. This includes sustainable environment, robust IT connectivity all through concept of smart computing. Newly invented and proposed technique of “Wi-Fi trash can” is a way towards “Smarter health, urban planning”. Annually around 60 million tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) is produced in urban areas. In this method, the garbage dumped will produce Wi-Fi signal strength for about 15 minutes. This is an approach to attract people who are crazy for internet surfing and will create a sense of responsibility among everyone to not throw garbage anywhere. Designing of technology based theme parks will enhance the view of cities. Designing gym which includes all types of health monitoring systems which operates through the concept of WBAN (wireless body area networks). Drone based monitoring of cities to control the theft rate is too an innovative approach towards smart area networking. Moreover pollution monitoring system can be designed in which a hardware will be placed on vehicle which will record and display the percentage and amount of gases released from the vehicle.This will make person aware about which gas is being released at higher percentage from the vehicle so that proper action can be taken before it’s too late. This can be the way for new transition in the field of smarter environment.
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