Recap 2015: Smart cities become the next big catalysts

Given that M2M communications are at the very core of what makes a city smart, telcos stand to be primary beneficiaries as connectivity solution providers.

In what has the potential to become a significant area of opportunity for telcos, prime minister Narendra Modi announced the Smart City Mission in June, after which around 100 cities have already been shortlisted as part of the first stage of the program. A challenge round has been proposed for a smaller number of cities to qualify for the next stage.

It goes without saying that digitization of processes across various services provided by agencies such as the civic bodies and utility companies would go a long way in smartification of the identified cities. Some of the services that could be early candidates for digitization include water and electricity distribution and metering; municipal solid waste management; traffic management, and woman and child safety monitoring. The solutions employed in most of these instances would include large-scale use of sensors that feed data into a central system, most likely over a wireless network.

Moreover, it is a given that ubiquitous and affordable broadband connectivity options for citizens are what would make a smart-city tag meaningful—what use would be of a smartification if citizens are not able to have seamless access to the benefits being offered to them.

So as the 100 shortlisted cities compete with each other to get selected for the second stage of the program, it would be in their interest to work with service providers towards creating an edge in terms of the connectivity and communication infrastructure. No wonder then that “robust IT connectivity and digitalization” has been listed as a core infrastructure element in the Mission Statement & Guideline document for Smart Cities released by the ministry of urban development.

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