What can Bengaluru gain from Smart Cities Mission?

Bengaluru recently made it to the potential Smart Cities league. For a city of eight million-plus population and 800 sq km area, the minimal Central funding needs to be used smartly, like investing in a pan-city proposal for an integrated decision-making platform. This will form the basis for future evidence-based planning, help make smarter choices that make the city liveable.

One year has passed since the launch of the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Already, the mission has completed quite a few milestones. The ‘100 smart cities’ list has been prepared and the 20 cities ranked best by the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) have alre-ady started implementing their plans. Bengaluru was not part of the above lists, but along the way, it made an entry into the list.

The Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) is supposed to submit the Smart City Proposal (SCP) by the end of August 2016. This is not an easy task considering the proposal-making guidelines prescribed by the MoUD that the BBMP is required to follow. Managing the diverse needs and expectations of 198 wards and an eight-million plus population is a challenge.

The Mission guideline has proposed four types of city development options - Retrofitting, Redevelopment, Greenfield and Pan-city. The first two options aim to create area-based development models within the city, with improvement of basic infrastructure and services such as transport, water, sanitation, waste management, open spaces etc. The proposals already submitted by various cities have extensively explored these two options, mainly because of the relative ease of implementation within the allotted fund and time.

This is primarily because cities do not want, and actually do not need, to bear the burden of providing infrastructure and services to newer areas when existing areas have scope for improvement. The Pan-city proposals include more of a common control centre for transport services, water supply systems etc.

What the proposals lack is strategic thinking to improve the long-term liveability of a city. Even area-based planning needs a strategy to integrate with the larger context of city networks and flows. For example, a good pedestrian network and bike lanes for HSR Layout might help its residents, but it needs to be part of a larger network, connecting people with activities.

The SCM stresses the use of technology in providing better services to the citizens. There is no dearth of innovative, smart solutions in Bengaluru, a city that nurtures probably the largest number of tech Startups and tech giants in the country. Many of them work on creating solutions for urban challenges. For example, the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation has recently launched the ITS-based bus tracking system, outside the umbrella of the SCM.

The opportunity posed by the SCM can rather be used to augment intelligence that exists in a city. This can in turn enable cities in attracting investments in the long term as Central funds become scarce.

The BBMP can actually leverage the smart city opportunity to create an integrated data collection, management and analysis platform for the whole city. This would entail making data available for planning and decision-making which means all civic authorities, utilities and service providers will work on the same baseline data, make their plans, and report changes in the relevant quality-of-life indicators.

This platform can be effectively used to capture crowd-sourced data and citizen feedback in a more integrated manner. For example, it will be interesting to see how the efforts on the Smart City Proposal use the database created for the revised Master Plan of Bengaluru and the BBMP Restructuring Committee.

Moreover, information from phone-density data, radio-taxi usage etc, could be used for dynamic population mapping over the city space at different points of time which can help in better planning and management of the city. Advanced remote sensing technologies such as Light Detection and Ranging can provide different layers of data at a spatial level which immensely improve the quality of data used for urban planning exercises. Advanced analytics based on good quality data can help better understand the problems, linkages, and trade-offs over the urban space over a single platform. This ‘live’ platform can connect with the residents of the city to incorporate their intelligence and understanding in designing solutions that work in their context.

Data collection efforts

What are the benefits?  First, this can lead to a reduction in multiplicity and duplication of data collection efforts and, thus, savings in government exchequer. Second, it can facilitate more realistic planning processes that allow for consideration of all actors and aspects in a city system, thus enabling better decision-making through simulations and scenario-building operations. Third, it will demand greater accountability from institutions since mismatch between databases can be easily indicated, and updated.

Fourth, it can set the base for a much better reporting mechanism by institutions across a common set of indicators. Fifth, and probably the most profound in essence, is that such a data management platform can enable micro-level planning and empower citizens to talk to the local government and other stakeholders. This would be a step forward towards implementing the decentralisation agenda and empowering local institutions such as ward committees.

An integrated data management and analysis platform is definitely not an end to itself, but an important step towards creating a full-fledged pan-city decision-support system. Such integration will make room for consideration of environment and natural resources that generally run the risk of being left out in the planning stage and then are added as after-thoughts.

In essence, this will go a long way in creating good governance at the city level with greater accountability, transparency, participation and inclusion. Let’s not forget that the stated objective of the Mission is to create ‘inclusive and sustainable’ cities. In the words of renowned urban sociologist Saskia Sassen, “…design a system that puts all that technology truly at the service of the inhabitants – and not the other way around.”

(Rathi is Principal Research Scientist and Bhattacharya is Senior Research Scientist at C-STEP, Bengaluru)