Being Smart About Becoming a Smart City

Last month the Ministry of Urban Development released it's Smart Cities Mission Guidelines. The release was greatly anticipated with several forums, discussions and white papers released about what constitutes becoming a 'Smart City'. With varying definitions and propositions, the city development/management must have been waiting with baited breath to see how the MoUD defines a 'Smart City'. Predictably, the release of the mission statement and guidelines did not quite answer that question. It refreshingly asks the cities to outline a concept of what they believe would be a Smart City for themselves. 

The first question is what is meant by a ‘smart city’. The answer is, there is no universally accepted definition of a Smart City. It means different things to different people. The conceptualisation of Smart City, therefore, varies from city to city and country to country, depending on the level of development, willingness to change and reform, resources and aspirations of the city residents. A Smart City would have a different connotation in India than, say, Europe. Even in India, there is no one way of defining a Smart City. - Smart Cities Mission Guidelines.

In order to bring some order into this conceptualization, the MoUD has tied the mission to the development of core infrastructure that include:

i. adequate water supply,
ii. assured electricity supply,
iii. sanitation, including solid waste management,
iv. efficient urban mobility and public transport,
v. affordable housing, especially for the poor,
vi. robust IT connectivity and digitalization,
vii. good governance, especially e-Governance and citizen participation,
viii. sustainable environment,
ix. safety and security of citizens, particularly women, children and the elderly, and
x. health and education.

These core needs aren't an exhaustive list as per the mission guidelines, so there is a bit of wiggle room for city governments to further add new 'core' needs. The statement also states the mission of the investments is to drive economic growth and improve the quality of life of people by enabling local area development and harnessing technology that leads to smart outcomes. Primarily it is an effort to use technology, information and data to improve infrastructure and services.

The mission is slated to cover 100 cities and the duration of the mission is five years that maybe continued by the MoUD. The guidelines also outline components for cities to develop a smart city strategy that are defined as -

Retrofitting,
Redevelopment,
Greenfield, and; 
Pan City,

wherein the first three have to be include as part of the fourth - the Pan City Strategy. Cities will have to formulate their concept and vision of a Sart City, and develop a Smart City Proposal (SCP) and be submitted as part of the Smart Cities Challenge, to be in the running for selection.

Where to Start Being Smart?

Where do cities begin being smart? Almost all of the core infrastructure sectors outlines are needed with varying degrees of urgency within each city. Some maybe low hanging fruit, while others are dire needs. Is there a methodical way of building one Smart City investment over another? Which of these would give the local politicians the greatest political mileage? Which one of these would be a long lasting bureaucratic legacy of government servants? All of these questions must be competing for primacy with the local cities' leadership.

Some of these sectors will automatically rise up as immediate needs for investment, or because they maybe easy to setup ( health/education/safety). For others, it would be a bit of back and forth on others trying to grapple with which combination of these would fit the criteria of driving economic growth and improving quality of life.  Some of  the decisions will depend on how the ULBs and other electeds perceive such investments as marketing tools for the next election cycles, and/or on stakeholders demanding investments that provide long term improvements. For the technocrat in charge of developing the SCP, it will be important to sell the strategy on both the short term and long term merits. 

Based on my understanding of issues and management of urban India, and the fact they are pretty much in the same situation across most the country,  I would recommend the following priority of Pan-City investments that would have the greatest impacts on a city's economic vitality and quality of life : 

Priority Number 1: Upgrading and digitizing land ownership and property tax record keeping.

While this comes under the e-Governance category, it has the potential to have the most profound influence on a city's economic vitality. Land records in India are fraught with issues of ownership and uncertainty wherein in both individuals and businesses have to spend inordinate amount of resources and time to make sure the title to the land is not contested. This murkiness in ownership, ties up the huge capitalization value of land that would otherwise fuel economic activity.  This also impacts the property tax revenue collection that funds most municipal services. With transparency in land ownership, cities can probably more than double revenue collections, and make circle rate fixing based upon actual empirical data, than the more arbitrary methods used by District Collectors. 

With citizens having clean title to land/real estate, as well as cities having a more secure and predictable revenue forecasts, both can use that to raise capital from banks, and bond markets that would fuel economic activity and proper development and maintenance of municipal infrastructure. 

Short-term gain: Transparency, good governance, citizen's ability to capitalize land value more effectively.

Long-term gain: Improve property tax revenues, greater predictability on revenue projections, improve city's bond market ratings, more revenues in the hands of municipality to finance existing infrastructure maintenance or new infrastructure, greater financial autonomy from state/central governments.  

Priority Number 2: Secured Electricity Supply through connecting decentralized electricity generation to the grid. 

After capital, access to energy is the most crucial aspect of economic growth. India has a huge shortfall that it is frantically trying to fulfill with highly polluting coal-fired plants. With new technologies in renewable energy production and smart/decentralized grid technologies, Indian cities could begin to lower the burden of both pollution and  electricity production by investing in such infrastructure. Cities have tremendous scope generating roof-top solar, small/mid sized bio-waste electricity generation, and other small scale energy generation technologies. These may not make a city self reliant, but can help secure uninterrupted supply. Cities would have to come up with programs or incentives that would allow private citizens to generate electricity through renewable means and sell it at retail prices back to the grid( Net Energy Metering). Bio-waste plants could take care of both electricity production and waste management, reducing the city's environmental footprint while saving citizens both money and from the ill effects of pollution. This would require some complex policy negotiations between cities, state electricity boards, and the center to allow for private electricity generation to be plugged into the grid, however, the resulting short-term and long term impacts could be profound impacts on assured energy supply, and sustainable energy production.

Short-term gain: Private investment and entrepreneurs into the city's infrastructure, steady growth of electric supply reliability, citizens investing in energy production on their properties can reduce their electricity bills.

Long-term gain: Rapid scaling up of energy production; reduced green house gas emissions, better air quality, potential shift in towards local manufacturing of technology needed in setting decentralized energy production. 

Private solar program example: http://www.pge.com/en/mybusiness/save/solar/csi.page
Sewage energy production: http://www.sswm.info/content/biogas-electricity-small-scale

Priority Number 3: Streamlining Urban Mobility

The last (but certainly not-least) in my list is urban mobility. There is already much said and debated on this topic with large sums of money being invested in mass transit systems in many Indian cities through the JNNURM (now AMRUT) program. While we've been busy building the big mobility projects, we haven't yet figured out the small but vital last mile connectivity issues. This covers a whole plethora of needs and opportunities, but I am referring to creating a single system that can take you from rickshaw to metro rail - Integrated Multi-Modal Transportation. With several technology-based ride aggregation technologies already being used by the private sector, cities could take the opportunity to bring in all modes of public travel under one umbrella scheme, where real-time travel time predictability and costs could boost public transit ridership and encourage people to drive less. Imagine being able to hail a rickshaw, taxi, or board a metro train by the same device/card. Cities should look towards bringing all modes of pubic transit under one system. 

Short-term gain: Bringing para-transit, informal public transit into a controlled, predictable model. Improved service for citizens' access to public transportation. Potentially improve public transit ridership.

Long-term gain: Reduction of private automobile on roads, reduction in travel times - increased productivity, improved air quality, better utilization of urban land - currently consumed in surface parking. 


Some examples -
Chandigarh ecocabs: http://chandigarh.ecocabs.org/
Dwarka Bike Sharing: http://www.cyclesharing.in/delhi-metro-launches-cycle-sharing-pilot/
Pooch-O: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWTEgpXmYWo
Clipper Card: https://dr.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/whatsTranslink.do

These three sectors of core infrastructure investments can potentially have the largest impact on improving economic activity and quality of life for India's urban citizens. Access to capital trapped in land can help fund several other core infrastructure improvements needed. Assured energy production through green technologies would give a significant boost to manufacturing production. And efficient transportation would reduce the loss of time and costs of getting to and from work. Investment in any or all of these will have a tremendous impact on both economic activity and quality of life that would have both short and long term benefits for all of the city's residents. These three should be the cornerstone of every Smart City Proposal.

Ministry of Urban Development Smart Cities Site: http://smartcities.gov.in/