The smart city agenda is being promoted due to its immense business potential. However, such time as issues of land acquisition, sovereign guarantee and other legal aspects are resolved, don’t expect large amounts of private sector finance to come flowing in
While announcing the list of cities that were selected through the Smart City Challenge Competition, Union Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Venkaiah Naidu had said, “Smart city is an idea whose time has come”. Earlier, while launching the flagship Smart City Mission at Pune, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had dubbed it as a “people’s movement” and exhibited his Government’s resolve to accelerate its implementation.
The smart city concept promises adequate water and assured electricity supply, sanitation, including solid waste management, affordable housing for all, especially for the poor, efficient urban mobility and public transport, robust IT connectivity and digitalisation, e-governance, sustainable environment, safety and security of citizens, particularly women, children and the elderly, health and education. But to see it as the solution to all our urbanisation problems may be an over-statement.
Conceptually, there are two types of smart cities. First, building a new city from the scratch ie greenfield cities. Second, there are brownfield cities ie conversion of existing cities into smart cities, mostly by retrofitting the present infrastructure. However, there is yet another hybrid and derivative of brownfield concept which is based on converting only a part of the city ie area-based brown field concept.
As of now, we have gone in for only seven greenfield cities along the Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor and the rest of the existing cities have adopted the brownfield area-based concept. Maybe, this concept has been adopted due to financial or other constraints, but it is fraught with adverse consequences at the socio-political plane.
Jayesh Ranjan, Managing Director for Telangana State Industrial Corporation has said: “Covering a small enclave and not the entire city is tantamounts to rewarding a few and depriving the rest”. Presently, the Government is planning to develop three green field smart cities by 2019, all of which will be a part of a larger project ie Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC). These smart cities are scheduled to be completed by 2019, in two industrial cities of Dholera and Shendra-Bidkin.
The smart city agenda is energetically being promoted by global IT giants, engineering and consulting companies, keeping in view its immense business potential. Smart city will virtually be a hive of optical fiber network, wireless broad band connection and computerised smart sensors ubiquitous embedded into the urban fabric. Big data, Internet of Things and cloud computing will be the watch words.
Dan Hoornweg who led the World Bank’s ‘Sustainable Cities and Climate Change’ programme from 1993 to 2012 said, “Selling more IT and sophisticated algorithms might help a few of the very fortunate cities. Building a smart-city suburb next to a very unsustainable city can yield unpleasant lessons.”
Steve Hilton of world-renowned consultancy MachNation elucidates the problem of how to add intelligence to infrastructure already in place in the existing cities. People living in these cities make it difficult to retrofit smart city solutions because they do not want to relocate while you implement solutions that might impact their lives.
Moreover, cities generally have infrastructure under the management of different departments, so it requires a lot of project planning and integration. More importantly, citizens have security, privacy, and legal concerns about Internet of Things that might impact their businesses confidentiality and privacy. So is the case in Hyberabad where even big corporates have refused to get their facilities retrofitted.
Adriana Allen, of the Development Planning Unit at University College London, goes a step further and opines that, “More sustainable forms of urbanisation will require a more coherent approach to the urban-rural interface. Successful approaches tend to work through the concept of the ‘city-region’, where the comparative advantages of urban or metropolitan centres and their adjacent peri-urban and rural jurisdictions are combined to promote more balanced use of natural resources such as land, water, energy and to support mutually reinforcing social and economic development initiatives”.
Smart City Mission is an investment intensive proposition. Yearly allocation by the Government of India will just be Rs100 crore to each of the city for five years. Commenting on the availability of the funds for this mission, Naidu, in a Press statement said, “Presently, the funds are not adequate. Though from Government’s point of view this amount is substantial yet it not adequate from the point of view of implementation. We are heavily depending on foreign direct investment (FDI) and Public-private partnership model”.
Commenting on the availability of FDI and private sector funds, the US Ambassador to India has unreservedly stated that till such time the issues of land acquisition, sovereign guarantee and other legal aspects are resolved, to expect large amounts of private sector finance, either domestic or foreign, will be a challenge.
Critically examining our concept, Brookings Institute, an American think-tank, has commented on the viability of our concept. They have construed that our concept should have a plan for economic growth, rather than only on technology implementation.
Apparently, foreign participation in Smart City Mission seems to be lucrative. But it should be understood that they are here to exploit the smart city market with second generation technology. As per forecasts, the smart city market was estimated at $411.31 billion in 2014 which will grow to $1,134.84 billion by 2019.
Let us now scan the technology horizon. As per Alvin Toffler, an American writer known for his works discussing modern
technologies, “As our technological powers increase, side effects potential hazards also escalate”. Smart city technology is an easy prey to hacking by wayside juveniles.
According to Cesar Cerrudo, Chief Technology Officer at IOActive:
- The messiness of politics and the vulnerability of the Internet of Things is one big, unwieldy package.
- When Internet of Things devices run a ‘smart city’, security of systems are all very vulnerable.
- Hackers know about the cascade effect, and that they can use it to their advantage by launching an attack on a small, poorly secured system that doesn’t seem very critical, and setting off a chain reaction.
- Who’s responsible when a smart city crashes?
Let me end with a caustic comment on smart cities by Steven Poole, a British author and journalist, published in The Guardian, “Smart city is a wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people”. Let us hope that our area-based smart city concept may not turn out to be a stigma.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): RK Kaushal
Quelle/Source: Daily Pioneer, 14.07.2016
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