Lessons India Can Learn From The World

In the Global Perspective Panel of BW Smart Cities, different panelists participated and shared the lessons that India can learn from the world. The session was moderated by Amit Singh, Director, PwC. The names of the panelists are such as Atul Bengeri, Dell; Ankur Malhotra, VP, Govt. Relations & Policy, Accenture; Sudhir Mishra, Founder and Managing Partner, Trust Legal; Prof Chetan Vaidya, Director, School of Planning and Architecture and Chairman of Planning Education Board; and Leoni Muldoon, Senior Trade & Investment Commissioner, Austrade.

Amit Singh, Director, PwC, who was moderating the session started the conversation by raising a question on if new age planners can be called urban planners or new age urban techno planners. He opened the discussion on a good note, asking the speakers to throw some light on the same. 

Atul Bengeri, Dell, said, "Technology would be the backbone of the smart cities. It would be globally and for India as well. Everything in the world is today driven. Data means how the data is transformed, how it moved from one stage to another, how it collected and analyzed to bring the smartness. 

If I talk about what India should learn from other countries are the scaling up capabilities as they all are focussed on impeding needs and trying to solve the challenges of smart cities. The city should be loveable for citizens, clean, developed, enabled by tech and has a holistics development agenda. Dell is providing tech components and building ecosystem of smart cities partners. Also, the company launched Centre of Excellence in Bangalore to demonstrate and integrate how smart cities helps in the industrial development."

Ankur Malhotra, VP, Govt. Relations & Policy, Accenture, said, "For better smart cities, we first need smart towns. You need to make small villages smart in terms of education, transport by enabling the technology."

Sudhir Mishra, Founder and Managing Partner, Trust Legal, began talking by introducing himself as a practising lawyer who works primarily for the better functionality and planning in terms of sustainable living and smart planning. He took to the discussion by pointing out that Delhi and its outskirts are not livable right now and mentioned a few examples of the same. He said, " Off-lately, he has put in an Air pollution petition where the challenges are eliminated day in and day out, such as ill-planned tree plantation, construction dust etc."

He also mentioned a very positive example," from our wildlife sanctuaries where the tiger reserves are very well kept and regulated. The government sees on to who all would be entering a reserved forest in a single day. That's very smart", he remarked. 

Prof Chetan Vaidya, Director, School of Planning and Architecture and Chairman of Planning Education Board, said, "There is a need of integrated urban planning in the country. Public spaces should be well designed. Open space should be planned and designed. Urban planning is intuition based approach that should not happen and every planning should be on research based."

Leoni Muldoon, Senior Trade & Investment Commissioner, AUSTRADE, talked about the global perspective on India's smart cities mission, which is a complex, multi-faceted structure but It is hard for Australia to grab the scale of the problem which India has taken up to solve. 

Looking at the individual needs and community needs, the culture and inclusivity of the demands, its collaboration with the government, Australia is a good place. I am sure anybody who understand the basic idea behind a smart city mission, he would invariably think about hoards of different things such as community participation, city security and surveillance, transforming transportation, do an overhaul for better water management etc.

On similar lines, commercial and residential areas need to be included in an integrated urban plan where each of them is able to communicate with municipal leaders.Together they should be planning- what to build, how to build and where to build, have discussions on design innovation, road corridors, and derive change keeping in mind simple functional examples.Changing the conventional approach and moving towards regulation is also very critical.