Smart cities: Will a regulatory body help?

NEW DELHI: A regulatory body for smart cities, will it help address the problems of these cities? While one school of thought says it will, and another discounts the theory saying a regulator will only multiply the challenges.

During the inaugural session of Smart-Sustainable Cities, Technology and Innovation Summit 2015, the panel looked divided with some of the experts from the industry suggesting setting up of a regulator body for each urban entity that would cover host of user facilities and some opining against that.

Sumit D Chowdhury, Founder and CEO of GAIA Smart Cities, was of the view that there should not be any regulator for smart cities as with a body like that “you will have more bureaucracy, more people trying to tell you what it should be...nobody can tell you what a smart city should be.”

He further said that “Smart Cities is a journey, not a destination. Allocation of Rs 70 crores for creating each smart city is not adequate at all. Smartness has to be built-in in every project covering from traffic to housing to transportation to lighting to waste management amongst many others.”

But talking in favour of such regulator, Shashi Dharan, Managing Director, Bharat Exhibitions, said: “With the ever growing challenges in the development of smart cities, there is a need to set up a Smart City Regulatory Authority of India to give a direction and speed-up the process, and involve several ministries and legal bodies.”

European expert on smart cities, Anya Margaret Ogorkiewicz, Managing Director of the Keryx Group; Polish Permanent Representative to the CEN-CENELEC-ETSI Smart City Standardisation and Co-ordination Group, emphasized the need for such cities also to be sustainable apart from delivering new services which are globally competitive and are meant to meet energy and environment goals. “European Union had developed standards for city services as part of the common European standardization strategy,” she pointed out.

Vipin Tyagi, Director, Centre for Development of Telematic, said, “There is a need to develop technologies for building up smart cities locally. This is not a business problem, but a social problem” he underlined in the context of cities being organic entities. The networks in them would have to be M2M contacts.”

“Smartness built in the cities also demands the people to be smart” was the theme of an extensive analysis of the needs of smart cities infrastructure by many other experts.

Muktesh Chander, IPS and Special Commissioner (Traffic), Delhi Police, cautioned about smart cities also providing opportunities for criminals to misuse the networks. “Criminals will also be smart in such cities. Over 25,000 cyber incidents happen in India in a year but only 4,000 are registered. Police would also have to be trained to be smart in such cities,” he said.

The event was supported by Department of Electronics & Information Technology, Ministry of Communications & IT, Govof India;COAI; CENELEC; ETSI; GISFI; ITU-APT; TUGI; PTCIF.