The Indian Toll Collection Machinery Needs An Immediate Revamp
June 15, 2015
With the growth in the number of vehicles the need for expansive roads catering to thousands of vehicles moving across India has become inevitable. However, considering the present situation the current toll system has several drawbacks. Due to the limited number of toll booths and slow collection process, the average waiting time per vehicle is 10 minutes. This results in loses worth thousands of cores of Rupees in terms of fuel wastage. This long wait time often results in drivers getting irritated resulting in verbal spats and physical fights among people and the toll attendants. Several such incidents have been reported in the press with some of these fights even resulting in the death of the toll plaza attendants.
In addition, there are numerous cases of toll plaza accidents which happen due to the sudden lane changing by drivers for faster clearance. The major reason behind this is that, the security at the tolls is insufficient and it is beyond the traffic police’s control to manage the vast number of vehicles. We keep hearing of many such mishaps at toll plazas which mostly occur due to negligence either on the people’s side or due to lack of control from the government agencies including the police.. In case of events, where lives are lost, such losses are a life shattering experience.
As is well known, in such a scenario, the general public is a little hesitant in taking responsibilities of any such mishap. Hence it is incumbent on s the government to come up with an effective plan which bridges the gap between the toll management and the public expectation of the service that they experience. Introduction of an effective toll plaza operation plan by the government, its strict implementation and monitoring which would result in a more efficient and a more responsive and efficient system could be a good option for easing the challenges associated with the existing tolling process.
Operation & Maintenance – How to go about?
March 27, 2015
With the Construction Phase over and getting into Commercial Phase of Operations. There is always dilemma what methodology to use to start the Operations. The same might be useful to Concessionaires to make up their mind and decide the best methodology to go forward with.
Have listed the options available as of today with the knowledge and experience gained form industry with their pros and cons.
- OMT Operator
- Professional Man Power Vendors
- Man Power Vendors
- In House
Option |
Pros |
Cons |
OMT Operators
|
Strong Process
Professional Approach Can attract talent to be part of the team. Takes complete responsibility. Mobilize team quickly. Very useful for setting new set up. Works on SOP. All statutory compliance adhered to Complete management of manpower, materials, and processes required for day to day O&M . No chance of union being formed. The team of SPV can focus on major issues on how to enhance the revenue rather than handling the hassles of day to day operations. Single point of contact. Thus vendor management easy
|
Where the organization is set up and process quite good as per the industry standards, will not be of much use.
Might have SLA but the value associated with the same is not much to ensure that they take the extra effort. Duplication of roles – Even if given OMT we will still require certain critical positions like – Project Manager, Plaza Manager. Toll Supervisor, Maintenance Manager, Safety Manager. On the expensive side.
|
Professional Man Power Vendors
|
All statutory compliance adhered to
Complete management of manpower, materials, processes required for day to day O&M at site Most of the team working with them works as a long term relationship. Since only blue collar level profile outsourced hence no duplication of roles. Less expensive compared to OMT operators. Follow instructions. Since they prefer in not hiring locals hence the chance of the team forming nexus with the locals is reduced. No chance of union being formed The team of SPV can focus on major issues on how to enhance the revenue rather than handling the hassles of day to day operations. Single point of contact. Thus vendor management easy |
Do not take owners ship.
Not strong in handling locals. Training will be needed to be imparted for the team which joins. Slightly on the expensive side compared to other manpower vendors. |
Man Power Vendors |
Manpower out sourced.
Low at cost. No need to worry about hiring or firing of an employee. No chance of union being formed Since only blue collar level profile outsourced hence no duplication of roles |
Not confident in handling statutory compliance.
No sense of responsibility No training imparted to staff Usually hires locals. Thus chances of nexus high SPV team will be involved in day to day operations. |
In House |
Can get our SOP implemented with ease.
The team works with the aim to grow with the organization. Loyalty with the organization is there. Complete management of manpower, materials, and processes required for day to day O&M at site. More control over the team. Works out economical. |
Chances of forming union are high.
The majority of time will be utilized in Hiring , Training Handling the day to day shift operations. Will have to handle all statutory compliance on own.
|
About the Author : Nipun soni is a Management Graduate with over 16 years of experience and in depth knowledge of BOT plus front line experience of toll operation, sales and customer service. He is known for his involvement in following projects:
- Led the mobilization team for 4 BOT Projects plus set the system and procedure for the biggest Point of Sale Operations in India at Delhi Gurgaon Super Connectivity Ltd.
- Set up and mobilized the operations for Multi-Level Car Parking ( capacity of 4300 cars ) in Delhi International Airport .
- Also involved in setting up SOP and ensuring the implementation of the same across various concessionaires
He have also been involved in Setting up of establishments, right from back end to front end to delivery i.e. Equipment Design, Procurement to Installation and Commissioning of the Project .Involved in starting Commercial operations and stabilizing Operations and Maintenance and meeting expectation of the Management with Optimization of Revenue while maintaining good health of Project and good relations across with the Client and Customer while meeting all social obligations.
Smart jobs for smart cities
January 6, 2015
An ideal scenario: A coastal city with shiny new buildings. Trees are planted on every side of the street and the air is automatically purified each hour. You can pay with your phone and charge your car at every parking place. A dream? This isn’t a modern science fiction novel, but is happening as we speak. These technologies are being developed in China, often in cooperation with Western companies.
The above is what is now termed as ‘smart city’. Smart cities are a hot topic and a commonly used buzzword today. This concept primarily involves combination of human capital and technology to create a sustainable environment. Such cities work towards improving sustainable economic development, infrastructure and also create a higher quality of life for the citizens as they contribute to this process.
China probably identified this opportunity one of the earliest and acted its way through in creating several such smart cities. McKinsey Global Institute wrote in 2009 that China’s urban population will grow from 527 million in 2005 to 926 million in 2025. Cities with a population exceeding 1 million are likely to increase from 153 to 226 in that same period. In 2011, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics announced that China’s urbanisation rate had surpassed 50%. This was the first time in China that more citizens were living in cities than in rural areas.
An important drive for developing smart cities is the rising middle class. Another report from McKinsey in 2013 considers consumers in China with household incomes between 106,000 to 229,000 yuan to be the upper middle class. According to McKinsey, in 2012, this segment accounted for just 14% of urban households. Their estimates for 2022 show a turnaround, with 56% becoming upper middle class and 14% mass middle class, which are household incomes ranging from 60,000 to 106,000 yuan.
Does India fit into the above scenario? Do we see a rising opportunity in creating smart cities which, in turn, creates a sustainable environment for its citizens?
Urbanisation in India has significant implications for the future development of the country. By 2030, India’s urban population will touch 590 million or nearly twice that of the US, while Indian cities will generate close to 70% of the GDP. This will exert tremendous pressure on urban infrastructure and services. It is, therefore, imperative that we find innovative solutions for the urban challenges of growth and sustainability.
This dramatic growth also provides impetus for the creation of smart cities which leverage information and communications technology (ICT) to greatly improve the productivity, lifestyle and the prosperity of our people. Additionally, green growth strategies can build environmentally sustainable cities.
India has 50 cities with more than a million people; China now has more than 350. Job creation needs new cities because it will replace the current short-term thinking of taking people to jobs with a more sustainable solution of taking jobs to people. There will be strong regional disparities in the next 20 years; five states in the South and West of India (Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh) will see 50% of the country’s GDP growth but only 5% of population growth. We must define urbanisation carefully; it is not about relocating more people into the larger cities nor is it about well-planned economic wastelands like Chandigarh. We have seen emergence of small pockets of economic success in areas like Gurgaon near Delhi, Gachibowli near Hyderabad, Magarpatta near Pune, Whitefield in Bangalore and Mohali near Chandigarh, but these are from far being identified as smart cities.
The next question is, how do we create these smart cities? The recent announcement from the government to create a ‘Digital India’ is a positive move. A budget of $1.2 billion has been allocated for smart cities alone. This should encourage some of the big-wig technology firms to submit proposals to local governments, and collaborate with real estate developers to build sustainable green cities.
Industrial corridors between India’s big metropolitans like the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, the Chennai-Bangalore Industrial Corridor and the Bangalore-Mumbai Economic Corridor seem a positive move. It is hoped that many industrial and commercial centres will be recreated as ‘smart cities’ along these belts. The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), which is spread across six states, seeks to create seven new smart cities as the nodes of the corridor in its first phase.
The very idea of smart cities is based on the assumption that there are technocratic solutions for the routine problems that citizen face. Problems of inefficiency that are seen to dominate the old bureaucratic-political order are hence given a ‘smart’ solution by employing ‘Big Data’.
Another positive impact of the ‘smart city’ and ‘Digital India’ projects is job creation, which will be, needless to say, ‘smart’. While it is difficult to give an estimate of jobs that will be generated and the reduction in labour migration, one can confidently say that even if work begins on 5-10 smart cities over the next two years, we would have created a favourable ecosystem for many thousands of jobs. This will be more inclined towards white-collar jobs as IT professionals will be in greater demand; IT infrastructure being the backbone of any smart city. Data analytics, programming, high-end consulting, system and network integration will be the order of the day and professionals and students in this area can expect better opportunities. It is a great time and opportunity for the ‘Internet of Things’, as they call it.
With a burgeoning urban population, there is an immediate need for creation of infrastructure facilities to satisfy the increasing urbane aspirations of our populace and smart cities seem to the solution. While the focus seems to have shifted towards smart cities and urbanisation, care must be taken so as to ensure the large percentage of population that relies on unskilled jobs and agriculture are not left behind.
By Mohit Gupta
The author is co-founder & director, TeamLease Services
Source: The Financial Express
Vinayak Chatterjee: What is a ‘smart city’?
January 6, 2015
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has certainly focused India’s attention on the urbanisationimperative and got the “smart city” concept buzzing. As things stand, the urbanisation agenda is in three parts:
- urban renewal of 500 cities;
- rejuvenation of heritage cities (like Varanasi), and
- the implementation of 100 smart cities; understood to be both “greenfield” and “brownfield”.
While renewal and rejuvenation are relatively easier to grasp, there appears to be only an evocative imagination in the public mind as to what the contours of a smart city could be.
So, here are 10 suggested attributes that may well describe, and to some extent define a smart city.
(i) Information, communication, and technology (ICT)-enabled governance: The international and domestic big daddies of the information technology (IT) world have, with their aggressive presentations, virtually hijacked the smart city definition to only mean IT-enabled administration and governance. While such a restrictive definition is undesirable, enabling ICT is clearly one of the more important planks. Often referred to as “smart government”, the use of integrated technology platforms that are easily accessible across various devices is certainly key to providing access, transparency, speed, participation and redressal in public services. For example, on December 10, 2014, the President launched the Karnataka Mobile One app in Bengaluru that would provide citizens a range of e-governance services over mobile phones.
(ii) Efficient utilities – energy, water, solid waste and effluents: This area is often the most talked about after IT. Smart meters, renewable energy, energy conservation, water harvesting, effluent recycling, scientific solid waste disposal methods et al are all clearly the hallmark of a smart city.
(iii) Meaningful PPPs: The creative use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) is a key attribute of the smart city concept. PPPs are to be used not only as a source of much-needed capital but also for the efficient delivery of utilities with agreed service-level standards. PPPs could range from health care to street lighting; and be used wherever there is a clear connection between the provision of a service and the ability to charge for the same – directly or even indirectly.
(iv) Safety and security: This aspect is high in public consciousness, especially with disconcerting news on the safety of women, road rage, robbery attacks on the elderly and juvenile delinquency. Clearly, networks of video-cameras, brightly lit public areas, intensive patrolling and surveillance, identity-verified access, and rapid response to emergency calls are all on the expectations list.
(v) Financial sustainability: The 74th Amendment to the Constitution (1992) enjoins towns and cities to “take charge of their own destinies”. Nowhere is this more important than financial independence. This is only possible with elaborate and extensive tapping of all sources of revenue – property taxes, advertisements et al; coupled with astute collection of user-pay charges across the full range of utilities. It also has to do with the elements of fiscal discipline that would enable the raising of long-term debt like municipal bonds.
(vi) Citizen-participative local government: The enthusiastic participation of citizens in local issues needs careful designing of electoral and participative fora. The current apathy towards civic elections needs comprehensive reversal.
(vii) Sufficient social capital: Smart cities cannot be devoid of the appropriate levels of social infrastructure – like schools, hospitals, public spaces, sporting and recreational grounds and retail and entertainment venues. Along with a brain that works, and hands and legs that move, it must also have a heart that beats to the joys of daily living.
(viii) Transit-oriented habitats: “Walk-to-work” is the dream solution here. Nevertheless, conveniently networked public transportation with first- and last-mile connectivities in place, reduced motivation to use personal vehicles, use of electric cars, and bicycle paths are all in the expectation matrix.
(ix) Green features: Minimising the carbon footprint and eco-friendliness are de rigueur. Parks and verdant open spaces, absence of pollution, use of renewables, conservation and recycling are mandatory.
(x) Minimum population criteria: Towards the end of November 2014, Panasonic Corporation announced the opening of its new business vector – the sustainable smart town (SST) at Fujisawa in Japan. It has rooftop solar energy, electric cars and electric-powered bicycles. However, it comprises only 1,000 homes over 47 acres that will have a population of 3,000 people. This kind of project is at best a smart enclave, and clearly, in the Indian context, cannot be included in the definition of a city. India has 5,545 urban agglomerations. Class 1 towns (called cities) are those with a population of 100,000 and above. This should be the minimum population cut-off for a smart city.
Achieving all the 10 attributes may well be Utopian. So, maybe even if seven out of the 10 attributes are achieved, we should have no hesitation in declaring an urban habitation as a smart city.
[email protected]
The truth about smart cities: ‘In the end, they will destroy democracy’
January 6, 2015
A woman drives to the outskirts of the city and steps directly on to a train; her electric car then drives itself off to park and recharge. A man has a heart attack in the street; the emergency services send a drone equipped with a defibrillator to arrive crucial minutes before an ambulance can. A family of flying maintenance robots lives atop an apartment block – able to autonomously repair cracks or leaks and clear leaves from the gutters.
Such utopian, urban visions help drive the “smart city” rhetoric that has, for the past decade or so, been promulgated most energetically by big technology, engineering and consulting companies. The movement is predicated on ubiquitous wireless broadband and the embedding of computerised sensors into the urban fabric, so that bike racks and lamp posts, CCTV and traffic lights, as well as geeky home appliances such as internet fridges and remote-controlled heating systems, become part of the so-called “internet of things” (the global market for which is now estimated at $1.7tn). Better living through biochemistry gives way to a dream of better living through data. You can even take an MSc in Smart Citiesat University College, London.
Yet there are dystopian critiques, too, of what this smart city vision might mean for the ordinary citizen. The phrase itself has sparked a rhetorical battle between techno-utopianists and postmodern flâneurs: should the city be an optimised panopticon, or a melting pot of cultures and ideas?
And what role will the citizen play? That of unpaid data-clerk, voluntarily contributing information to an urban database that is monetised by private companies? Is the city-dweller best visualised as a smoothly moving pixel, travelling to work, shops and home again, on a colourful 3D graphic display? Or is the citizen rightfully an unpredictable source of obstreperous demands and assertions of rights? “Why do smart cities offer only improvement?” asks the architect Rem Koolhaas. “Where is the possibility of transgression?”

The smart city concept arguably dates back at least as far as the invention of automated traffic lights, which were first deployed in 1922 in Houston, Texas. Leo Hollis, author of Cities Are Good For You, says the one unarguably positive achievement of smart city-style thinking in modern times is the train indicator boards on the London Underground. But in the last decade, thanks to the rise of ubiquitous internet connectivity and the miniaturisation of electronics in such now-common devices as RFID tags, the concept seems to have crystallised into an image of the city as a vast, efficient robot – a vision that originated, according toAdam Greenfield at LSE Cities, with giant technology companies such as IBM, Cisco and Software AG, all of whom hoped to profit from big municipal contracts.
“The notion of the smart city in its full contemporary form appears to have originated within these businesses,” Greenfield notes in his 2013 book Against the Smart City, “rather than with any party, group or individual recognised for their contributions to the theory or practice of urban planning.”

Whole new cities, such as Songdo in South Korea, have already been constructed according to this template. Its buildings have automatic climate control and computerised access; its roads and water, waste and electricity systems are dense with electronic sensors to enable the city’s brain to track and respond to the movement of residents. But such places retain an eerie and half-finished feel to visitors – which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising. According to Antony M Townsend, in his 2013 book Smart Cities, Songdo was originally conceived as “a weapon for fighting trade wars”; the idea was “to entice multinationals to set up Asian operations at Songdo … with lower taxes and less regulation”.
In India, meanwhile, prime minister Narendra Modi has promised to build no fewer than 100 smart cities – a competitive response, in part, to China’s inclusion of smart cities as a central tenet of its grand urban plan. Yet for the near-term at least, the sites of true “smart city creativity” arguably remain the planet’s established metropolises such as London, New York, Barcelona and San Francisco. Indeed, many people think London is the smartest city of them all just now — Duncan Wilson of Intel calls it a “living lab” for tech experiments
So what challenges face technologists hoping to weave cutting-edge networks and gadgets into centuries-old streets and deeply ingrained social habits and patterns of movement? This was the central theme of the recent “Re.Work Future Cities Summit” in London’s Docklands – for which two-day public tickets ran to an eye-watering £600.
The event was structured like a fast-cutting series of TED talks, with 15-minute investor-friendly presentations on everything from “emotional cartography” to biologically inspired buildings. Not one non-Apple-branded laptop could be spotted among the audience, and at least one attendee was seen confidently sporting the telltale fat cyan arm of Google Glass on his head.
“Instead of a smart phone, I want you all to have a smart drone in your pocket,” said one entertaining robotics researcher, before tossing up into the auditorium a camera-equipped drone that buzzed around like a fist-sized mosquito. Speakers enthused about the transport app Citymapper, and how the city of Zurich is both futuristic and remarkably civilised. People spoke about the “huge opportunity” represented by expanding city budgets for technological “solutions”.

Strikingly, though, many of the speakers took care to denigrate the idea of the smart city itself, as though it was a once-fashionable buzzphrase that had outlived its usefulness. This was done most entertainingly by Usman Haque, of the urban consultancy Umbrellium. The corporate smart-city rhetoric, he pointed out, was all about efficiency, optimisation, predictability, convenience and security. “You’ll be able to get to work on time; there’ll be a seamless shopping experience, safety through cameras, et cetera. Well, all these things make a city bearable, but they don’t make a city valuable.”
As the tech companies bid for contracts, Haque observed, the real target of their advertising is clear: “The people it really speaks to are the city managers who can say, ‘It wasn’t me who made the decision, it was the data.’”
Of course, these speakers who rejected the corporate, top-down idea of the smart city were themselves demonstrating their own technological initiatives to make the city, well, smarter. Haque’s project Thingful, for example, is billed as a search engine for the internet of things. It could be used in the morning by a cycle commuter: glancing at a personalised dashboard of local data, she could check local pollution levels and traffic, and whether there are bikes in the nearby cycle-hire rack.
“The smart city was the wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people,” suggested Dan Hill, of urban innovators the Future Cities Catapult. “It never answered the question: ‘How is it tangibly, materially going to affect the way people live, work, and play?’” (His own work includes Cities Unlocked, an innovative smartphone audio interface that can help visually impaired people navigate the streets.) Hill is involved with Manchester’s current smart city initiative, which includes apparently unglamorous things like overhauling the Oxford Road corridor – a bit of “horrible urban fabric”. This “smart stuff”, Hill tells me, “is no longer just IT – or rather IT is too important to be called IT any more. It’s so important you can’t really ghettoise it in an IT city. A smart city might be a low-carbon city, or a city that’s easy to move around, or a city with jobs and housing. Manchester has recognised that.”
One take-home message of the conference seemed to be that whatever the smart city might be, it will be acceptable as long as it emerges from the ground up: what Hill calls “the bottom-up or citizen-led approach”. But of course, the things that enable that approach – a vast network of sensors amounting to millions of electronic ears, eyes and noses – also potentially enable the future city to be a vast arena of perfect and permanent surveillance by whomever has access to the data feeds.
One only has to look at the hi-tech nerve centre that IBM built for Rio de Janeiroto see this Nineteen Eighty-Four-style vision already alarmingly realised. It is festooned with screens like a Nasa Mission Control for the city. As Townsend writes: “What began as a tool to predict rain and manage flood response morphed into a high-precision control panel for the entire city.” He quotes Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, as boasting: “The operations centre allows us to have people looking into every corner of the city, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
What’s more, if an entire city has an “operating system”, what happens when it goes wrong? The one thing that is certain about software is that it crashes. The smart city, according to Hollis, is really just a “perpetual beta city”. We can be sure that accidents will happen – driverless cars will crash; bugs will take down whole transport subsystems or the electricity grid; drones could hit passenger aircraft. How smart will the architects of the smart city look then?
A less intrusive way to make a city smarter might be to give those who govern it a way to try out their decisions in virtual reality before inflicting them on live humans. This is the idea behind city-simulation company Simudyne, whose projects include detailed computerised models for planning earthquake response or hospital evacuation. It’s like the strategy game SimCity – for real cities. And indeed Simudyne now draws a lot of its talent from the world of videogames. “When we started, we were just mathematicians,” explains Justin Lyon, Simudyne’s CEO. “People would look at our simulations and joke that they were inscrutable. So five or six years ago we developed a new system which allows you to make visualisations – pretty pictures.” The simulation can now be run as an immersive first-person gameworld, or as a top-down SimCity-style view, where “you can literally drop policy on to the playing area”.
Another serious use of “pretty pictures” is exemplified by the work of ScanLAB Projects, which uses Lidar and ground-penetrating radar to make 3D visualisations of real places. They can be used for art installations and entertainment: for example, mapping underground ancient Rome for the BBC. But the way an area has been used over time, both above and below ground, can also be presented as a layered historical palimpsest, which can serve the purposes of archaeological justice and memory – as with ScanLAB’s Living Death Campsproject with Forensic Architecture, on two concentration-camp sites in the former Yugoslavia.

For Simudyne’s simulations, meanwhile, the visualisations work to “gamify” the underlying algorithms and data, so that anyone can play with the initial conditions and watch the consequences unfold. Will there one day be convergence between this kind of thing and the elaborately realistic modelled cities that are built for commercial videogames? “There’s absolutely convergence,” Lyon says. A state-of-the art urban virtual reality such as the recreation of Chicago in this year’s game Watch Dogs requires a budget that runs to scores of millions of dollars. But, Lyon foresees, “Ten years from now, what we see in Watch Dogs today will be very inexpensive.”
What if you could travel through a visually convincing city simulation wearing the VR headset, Oculus Rift? When Lyon first tried one, he says, “Everything changed for me.” Which prompts the uncomfortable thought that when such simulations are indistinguishable from the real thing (apart from the zero possibility of being mugged), some people might prefer to spend their days in them. The smartest city of the future could exist only in our heads, as we spend all our time plugged into a virtual metropolitan reality that is so much better than anything physically built, and fail to notice as the world around us crumbles.
In the meantime, when you hear that cities are being modelled down to individual people – or what in the model are called “agents” – you might still feel a jolt of the uncanny, and insist that free-will makes your actions in the city unpredictable. To which Lyon replies: “They’re absolutely right as individuals, but collectively they’re wrong. While I can’t predict what you are going to do tomorrow, I can have, with some degree of confidence, a sense of what the crowd is going to do, what a group of people is going to do. Plus, if you’re pulling in data all the time, you use that to inform the data of the virtual humans.
“Let’s say there are 30 million people in London: you can have a simulation of all 30 million people that very closely mirrors but is not an exact replica of London. You have the 30 million agents, and then let’s have a business-as-usual normal commute, let’s have a snowstorm, let’s shut down a couple of train lines, or have a terrorist incident, an earthquake, and so on.” Lyons says you will get a highly accurate sense of how people, en masse, will respond to these scenarios. “While I’m not interested in a specific individual, I’m interested in the emergent behaviour of the crowd.”

But what about more nefarious bodies who are interested in specific individuals? As citizens stumble into a future where they will be walking around a city dense with sensors, cameras and drones tracking their every movement – even whether they are smiling (as has already been tested at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival) or feeling gloomy – there is a ticking time-bomb of arguments about surveillance and privacy that will dwarf any previous conversations about Facebook or even, perhaps, government intelligence agencies scanning our email. Unavoidable advertising spam everywhere you go, as in Minority Report, is just the most obvious potential annoyance. (There have already been “smart billboards” that recognised Minis driving past and said hello to them.) The smart city might be a place like Rio on steroids, where you can never disappear.
“If you have a mobile phone, and the right sensors are deployed across the city, people have demonstrated the ability to track those individual phones,” Lyon points out. “And there’s nothing that would prevent you from visualising that movement in a SimCity-like landscape, like in Watch Dogs where you see an avatar moving through the city and you can call up their social-media profile. If you’re trying to search a very large dataset about how someone’s moving, it’s very hard to get your head around it, but as soon as you fire up a game-style visualisation, it’s very easy to see, ‘Oh, that’s where they live, that’s where they work, that’s where their mistress must be, that’s where they go to drink a lot.’”
This is potentially an issue with open-data initiatives such as those currently under way in Bristol and Manchester, which is making publicly available the data it holds about city parking, procurement and planning, public toilets and the fire service. The democratic motivation of this strand of smart-city thinking seems unimpugnable: the creation of municipal datasets is funded by taxes on citizens, so citizens ought to have the right to use them. When presented in the right way – “curated”, if you will, by the city itself, with a sense of local character – such information can help to bring “place back into the digital world”, says Mike Rawlinson of consultancy City ID, which is working with Bristol on such plans.
But how safe is open data? It has already been demonstrated, for instance, that the openly accessible data of London’s cycle-hire scheme can be used to track individual cyclists. “There is the potential to see it all as Big Brother,” Rawlinson says. “If you’re releasing data and people are reusing it, under what purpose and authorship are they doing so?” There needs, Hill says, to be a “reframed social contract”.

Sometimes, at least, there are good reasons to track particular individuals. Simudyne’s hospital-evacuation model, for example, needs to be tied in to real data. “Those little people that you see [on screen], those are real people, that’s linking to the patient database,” Lyon explains – because, for example, “we need to be able to track this poor child that’s been burned.” But tracking everyone is a different matter: “There could well be a backlash of people wanting literally to go off-grid,” Rawlinson says. Disgruntled smart citizens, unite: you have nothing to lose but your phones.
In truth, competing visions of the smart city are proxies for competing visions of society, and in particular about who holds power in society. “In the end, the smart city will destroy democracy,” Hollis warns. “Like Google, they’ll have enough data not to have to ask you what you want.”
You sometimes see in the smart city’s prophets a kind of casual assumption that politics as we know it is over. One enthusiastic presenter at the Future Cities Summit went so far as to say, with a shrug: “Internet eats everything, and internet will eat government.” In another presentation, about a new kind of “autocatalytic paint” for street furniture that “eats” noxious pollutants such as nitrous oxide, an engineer in a video clip complained: “No one really owns pollution as a problem.” Except that national and local governments do already own pollution as a problem, and have the power to tax and regulate it. Replacing them with smart paint ain’t necessarily the smartest thing to do.
And while some tech-boosters celebrate the power of companies such as Über – the smartphone-based unlicensed-taxi service now banned in Spain and New Delhi, and being sued in several US states – to “disrupt” existing transport infrastructure, Hill asks reasonably: “That Californian ideology that underlies that user experience, should it really be copy-pasted all over the world? Let’s not throw away the idea of universal service that Transport for London adheres to.”
Perhaps the smartest of smart city projects needn’t depend exclusively – or even at all – on sensors and computers. At Future Cities, Julia Alexander of Siemens nominated as one of the “smartest” cities in the world the once-notorious Medellin in Colombia, site of innumerable gang murders a few decades ago. Its problem favelas were reintegrated into the city not with smartphones but with publicly funded sports facilities and a cable car connecting them to the city. “All of a sudden,” Alexander said, “you’ve got communities interacting” in a way they never had before. Last year, Medellin – now the oft-cited poster child for “social urbanism” – was named the most innovative city in the world by the Urban Land Institute.
One sceptical observer of many presentations at the Future Cities Summit, Jonathan Rez of the University of New South Wales, suggests that “a smarter way” to build cities “might be for architects and urban planners to have psychologists and ethnographers on the team.” That would certainly be one way to acquire a better understanding of what technologists call the “end user” – in this case, the citizen. After all, as one of the tribunes asks the crowd in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “What is the city but the people?”
Source: The Guardian
“Smart” Cities and the Urban Digital Revolution
January 5, 2015
Smog, sewage and congestion are three of the hallmarks of contemporary urban living. But these downsides to city living are gradually becoming things of the past. City planners are finding new ways to address these inefficiencies, leveraging connected technology to create smarter hubs that work for city dwellers.
Welcome to the era of “smart” cities. Advances in wireless sensor systems, information and communication technology (ICT), and infrastructure allow cities to collect and curate huge amounts of data capable of sustaining and improving urban life thanks to the new and ever-growing web of connected technology: The Internet of Things (IoT).
Last year, Los Angeles became the first city in the world to synchronize its traffic lights — all 4,500 of them — reducing traffic time on major LA corridors by about 12 percent, according to the city’s Department of Transportation. In Singapore, city authorities aretesting smart systems for managing parking and waste disposal to adjust to daily and weekly patterns. In New York City, mobile air pollution monitors help city leaders pinpoint those neighborhoods most affected by smog and pollutants, so residents can modify their commuting paths and preferred modes of transportation to avoid exposure to higher levels of pollution.
And cities across the U.S. — including Chicago, Seattle and Washington, D.C. — are hiring chief technology officers to oversee broad implementation of digital systems and technologies. As more and more city functions evolve from analog to digital, it makes sense for municipalities to put the improvement, functionality and security of those systems into one department. These city CTOs will quickly become indispensable cabinet positions.
What does it take for a city to earn the “smart” moniker?
So what does it take for a city to earn the “smart” moniker? Smart cities around the globe have many differences but importantly they share a few common traits. These cities invest in infrastructure and people in ways that lead to a more connected, better-informed and more-efficient environment. The dynamic use of knowledge to improve both the utilization of scarce resources and a higher quality of life for its citizens is the hallmark of a smart city.
Since the first Industrial Revolutions fueled the explosion in urban population growth, municipal governments have looked for ways to efficiently run services for densely located networks of people. The challenges of urban life have historically produced results that are less than adequate. But as sensors become more affordable and more ubiquitous, city officials have access to systems that their predecessors could never have imagined. Today, sensors are being used to monitor and dynamically adjust important public services, from parking availability to public transportation to snow removal to security.
IoT promises to put cities across the globe on the fast track to becoming “smart.” But we’re not there quite yet. The evolution of IoT involves three distinct phases. First, physical objects facilitate access to digital information. Second, physical objects are embedded with digital sensors to capture and transmit relevant information. And finally, physical objects receive digital prompts and cues which then alter the state of the physical object. This final stage will result in a seamless physical-digital sphere that holds tremendous promise in the building of smart cities.
As a society, we’re barely in the middle of phase one — most of our physical objects are not yet connected, though connection alone is not enough. Cities must also have the infrastructure for efficient data transactions: How information flows from Point A to Point B. Indeed, all city services are based on a calculation of where to expend precious resources. The more data available for these calculations, the more sophisticated and tailored they become. An example, driverless cars alone won’t solve a city’s traffic problems — but driverless cars that signal street sensors will give city officials the appropriate data to improve traffic patterns. This will require city governments to work in tandem with private companies, whether they manufacture cars or operate garbage dumps.
The challenges facing cities on the path to being “smart” are large and varied. It will require a new way of thinking — akin to mastering a new language. Nevertheless, modern cities everywhere are moving in one inexorable direction: Toward a future where city governance and urban living will be as connected as the functions on your smartphone.
Shawn DuBravac is the chief economist of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and the author of the forthcoming book “Digital Destiny: How the New Age of Data Will Transform the Way We Work, Live and Communicate.” Follow him @ShawnDubravac.
Source:Re/code
Are India’s ‘Smart Cities’ a Smart Move?
October 6, 2014
May 16, 2014 is now a historic day for democratic India, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s coalition winning an overwhelming majority. It sparked nationwide optimism, with a growing GDP, the Sensex rising over 10 percent in 4 months, and the hope of acche din (good days) for the Indian economy. As a part of the budget, the finance minister, Arun Jaitley, has promised numerous projects for this term, including the creation of 100 smart cities – or cities with sophisticated IT features.
This grandiose pledge had been envisioned by Modi as a part of the achhe din campaign from the outset. More than 7000 crore ($1.13 billion) has been allocated to the endeavor, or 70 crore per city. Insisting this was to be the seed money, the government pledged additional investments in due course. The concept is based on ecologically friendly urban settlements that exploit technology to offer a more structured living environment. Such cities would have a centralized control system that provides real-time data on the availability of water, electricity, education, public transportation and sanitation: the basic modern-day needs.
All of which begs a question: Are smart cities really important? The project’s aim is “housing for all,” and that is possible only through affordable housing. Much like other developing nations, India has high levels of rural-urban migration – the country is expected to have an urban population of 530 million by 2030, up from 390 million in 2008. Given the fast pace of development, better living standards are being sought by those with lower incomes, and a new middle class is emerging. Official data show that approximately 269 million people in India are still below the poverty line, but millions are moving out of poverty every year. It is for this rising class that the need for better living standards arises. To accommodate this growing and increasingly mobile populace, it is imperative that a sustainable model of housing be developed. But are smart cities the answer? Certainly, in theory the idea sounds very appealing. In practice, it is much less certain and the answer won’t be known until India actually builds some. India has already taken serious steps to turn certain cities into smart cities. International assistance has been sought from Singapore and Japan, among others. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between India and Japan to develop Varanasi into a smart city based on the experience of its Japanese counterpart – Kyoto.
It will be important to see what India is getting into, rather than becoming overwhelmed with the idea. The smart city concept implies an oversimplified vision of technology. It is based on the belief that technology can solve any problem without fundamentally changing lifestyles. However, can India’s problems actually be simplified to the point that they can be controlled by a large set of data points? Does this mean that the current problems are not social, but technological? Given a country as diverse as India, can the heterogeneity of its cities be accommodated in a linear vision backed by technology? These questions will be worth considering as the project proceeds. The concept, though, is immensely appealing: India is truly considered a symbol of “unity in diversity,” and this time the unity can be brought under the surmounting umbrella of technology.
The radical shift India is experiencing lifestyles and the attendant demands for a better standard of living could be answered by the concept of smart cities. The age of digitization is upon us, and it seems that sooner or later people will have to turn to technology to answer many of their problems. In Modi’s first 100 days as prime minister, a lot has been done; however, it is a short period to deliver something concrete on the technology front. Still, he has made a significant imprint with his tech-enabled beginning, and it may someday bear fruit.
In this era of digitization, it is interesting to see the nation’s leader envision such a future. On paper, the initiative seems to be an ideal plan for the poverty stricken economy, but given the high levels of bureaucracy, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. The move is very much in the right direction; execution, however, will be key.
Source:The Diplomat
‘Smart city needs smart populace’
September 30, 2014
The use of modern technology with ‘going green’ being the buzzword, innovation and smoother coordination between government bodies are a few key factors that can transform a city like Hyderabad into a smart city, opined a group of intellectuals who met here to deliberate on the various aspects and opportunities of building a ‘smart city,’ on Friday.
Addressing the gathering at the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI), minister for information technology K T Rama Rao said, “The concept of a smart city changes with the country in question. A smart city in Europe might not be the same as in India. For developing a smart city, we need a smart populace and there is the need to instill discipline in people regarding all matters.” According to him, Telangana with its 39 per cent urban population has a distinct advantage when compared to Andhra Pradesh which has 21% people living in urban areas to develop such a city.
He said the government would ensure that all big building install solar power panels to make them energy efficient. “There is a rule in the GHMC Act that makes installation of solar power units mandatory in all multi-storeyed constructions. But a majority of the population is completely unaware of this rule. This could be a major step towards providing a solution to the power crisis in the city and the state. But there has to be proper enforcement of the law for this purpose,” he said, urging GHMC commissioner Somesh Kumar, who was present at the meeting, to strictly follow up on its implementation.
V Srinivas Chary, dean of ASCI, said finding permanent solution to water supply and sewerage problems was crucial to building a smart city. “As per the service delivery standards laid down by the Government of India in 2008, the water board is supposed to reduce leakage of water by 70% and make sure that there is waste water collection. We have not been doing so well in the first aspect and as for the second, it is non-existent,” he said.
He said emerging technology should be adapted to address sewerage problems, for instance, toilets themselves can be turned into mini sewerage treatment plants. “It is this sort of innovation that a smart city is made of,” he said. Urban flooding must also be tackled by installing sensor-based flood control system along the catchment area, experts said, adding, that the city will soon witness the arrival of new GPS-based bus stops where screens would be put up to give commuters regular updates the services.
S K Rao, ASCI director-general delivered the keynote address while Ahmed Babu, special commissioner, GHMC, and Somarapu Satyanarayana, MLA were among those present at the event.
Source:Magic Bricks
Vinayak Chatterjee: Can toll roads be made user-friendly?
September 26, 2014
The Rajasthan High Court, last Monday (September 1), stayed the hike in toll on the Jaipur-Delhi national highway till such time as the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and the operator file an affidavit confirming that the road is in good condition and that a proper and maintained highway exists that justifies the toll charged.
India has been obsessed historically with asset creation, not effective asset utilisation. Highway build-operate-transfer projects were largely seen as yet another construction project with immediate order-book gains for construction companies. Though the concession agreement specified operations, maintenance and tolling service delivery standards across the life of the project, no one paid much attention to them. Many concessionaires did not have the mindset or the experience to manage long-term assets of this kind, and the attitude was to generally get by NHAI inspections.
The ministry of road transport and highways is now keen to revive road construction activity with a slew of engineering, procurement, construction (EPC) contracts – totalling to almost 10,000 km in the here and now. Interestingly, it is understood that these EPC packages are getting bundled with five to 10 years of operation & maintenance (O&M) obligations too. This is an eminently sensible decision. With all this, thankfully, “asset management” is getting the required attention. Increasing road-asset acquisitions by long-term financial investors, pressure for maximising toll revenue, greater oversight from the judiciary, higher focus by NHAI and the ministry, and greater media and activist attention are also adding up. Many myths, hitherto used to justify poor O&M, seem to be getting exposed.
My friend and colleague Vivek Rastogi, who is a well-recognised expert in road operations and maintenance, has over the past few years been dissecting a few myths about highway operations and maintenance.
Myth one: Toll revenue is under pressure, so funds are short for operations and maintenance
Developers have been complaining about lower-than-anticipated traffic on their highways. This is indeed true in some specific cases where local and surrounding issues have lead to reduced movements. However, empirical data from different parts of the country reveal that the actual traffic over the last year, measured as passenger car units has increased by 2 to 12 per cent. This is also borne out by NHAI data. In addition, inflation-indexed toll rates have increased. Better tolling processes, wherever implemented, have boosted revenue, resulting in an overall 12 to 30 per cent increase in toll revenue in rupee terms. Therefore, toll revenue pressure is clearly not the overriding constraint particularly when one factors in that O&M expenses hardly ever exceed 3 to 5 per cent of toll collections. It is often a convenient excuse for complacency and lethargy among highway site-operations teams. Financially, the culprit is over-aggressive bids based on over-optimistic toll projections and under-estimated O&M costs that have not matched real life, thus leading to a “virtual” funds crunch.
Myth two: Lack of support from local administration
The experience on the ground is different, particularly in the bulk of the states where NHAI has the state support agreement in place. Barring sporadic incidents of politically-inspired attacks for media attention, most developers have received reasonable support from the police and district administration. The same holds for media, which has largely been publishing all sides of an “incident” story pretty fairly. This has helped get miscreants arrested at toll plazas. Traffic diversions for escaping tolls have been blocked by the district administration, and elected representatives in most cases, have been supportive of operations according to the concession agreement. Local problems will continue but it has now been seen that solutions can be found with regular and correct liaison with the district authorities.
Myth three: Route operations and route patrolling is an unnecessary spend
The purpose of route operations is to ensure that incidents and accidents on the highway get quick support and attention, and the traffic flows smoothly. Unfortunately, route operations and patrolling are often the first areas where operators try to cut costs with hugely deleterious effects on user satisfaction. It is a rare sight to see regular patrol cars, helpful signage and roadside amenities on Indian highways. Good route operation practices can save precious lives in highway accidents – an area of notoriety for India. This uncaring attitude is primarily based on the fact that road concessionaires still do not see themselves as “service deliverers”, where customer satisfaction and loyalty are necessary for survival as in the case of other businesses where customers have a choice. NHAI clearly needs far higher enforcement of standards in this area.
Myth four: Asset maintenance can be delayed
Roads typically have the following types of maintenance patterns: routine (preventive and reactive) and episodic (say, overlays in five years). In both the categories, the usual business practice is to delay matters till the road surface is either in a shambles or the spectre of penalties looms large. Sadly also, there is minimum use of technical advancements. The net result is a severe deterioration of the life-cycle quality of the asset as well as user-satisfaction. But the concessionaire believes he has “smartly” saved costs.
Myth five: Traffic tail-ending at toll plazas is inevitable
This need not be so. The ease with which cars zip through electronic toll barriers abroad clearly demonstrates the art of the possible. It is surprising that in India, we are not sufficiently agitated with the minutes we are required to wait before passing through a toll barrier. The slow pace of implementing cost-effective electronic tolling and dedicated electronic lanes is a testimony to our collective national lethargy on this aspect. Even without this, hand-held devices with roaming toll-collectors, aggressive marketing of on-board prepaid devices and systematic lane-management, could, if there is a will, actually seek to eliminate tail-ending at toll plazas.
Myth six: Continuing toll-collection during carriageway widening is appropriate
This is clearly addressed to NHAI and the ministry of road transport and highways. The existing model concession agreements, from their lofty perch, clearly did not see the practical problems of allowing toll-collection to continue when carriageway are being widened. It is clearly messy and has a high irritability quotient for all users. Further, it takes away from the spirit of a hassle-free drive questioning the rationale of the toll, and creates a strong negative perception which, as in the case of the Delhi-Jaipur highway, invites the wrath of the judiciary. This should be discontinued in future contracts.
There is clearly a growing need for a new generation of specialised outsourced “asset management partnerships” to manage the operative life-cycle of an asset properly and most importantly, deliver value to the customer. Myths will not do.
Source:Business Standard