Smart Cities: Five things I’m wondering about

Two days, countless cities in the balance Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be launching three crucial national missions: Smart Cities, Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) and Housing for All on June 25. The invite to the two-day summit (June 25-26) at Vigyan Bhawan has been tough to get, the agenda is power packed, representatives from state governments have started arriving in the Capital and the Smart Cities universe we traverse is abuzz with excitement. The announcements on Day One include guidelines for the three missions, and an exhibition, the two-day programme will kick off with the PM revealing the guidelines, logos and taglines for the two missions – the last two selected via a unique experiment in crowdsourcing via the citizen engagement platform MyGov. This will be followed by a presentation on PPPs for Smart Cities and one by NASSCOM on Smart Solutions. The focus on AMRUT will include reforms under the Mission and city-and state-level planning, followed by a presentation by the Ministry of Finance on the devolution of funds to states by the 14th Finance Commission. Apart from the announcement, a number of projects will be showcased, including local area planning in Ahmedabad; Mumbai’s Bhendi Bazaar redevelopment; innovative citizen-driven solutions and property tax enhancement from Hyderabad as well as those in water supply from Nagpur. Day Two will shine a light on Housing for All and Swachh Bharat, as well as the distribution of sanction letters to AMRUT Cities by the Urban Development Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu. Also taking centre stage will be waste-to-energy-and-compost and the international experience on waste-to-wealth technology options, community and public toilets, town planning, door-to-door waste collection and energy-efficient street lighting. Finding place in the programme are discussions on the City Challenge and the role of special purpose vehicles (SPVs) in Smart Cities, heritage city development and a technical session on Housing for All. My Top Five I’ve been following developments, discussions and debates on Smart Cities for the past six months now, both dutifully and with growing personal interest in this fascinating space, and most of them boil down to some of the same confusions and questions that also posit interesting talking points while providing us with exciting ideas and opinion to fill the pages of our magazine. Here are some (in a long and non-exhaustive list) that I continue to wonder about, and sincerely hope to find glimmers of answers to in the next two days at Vigyan Bhawan, as the Smart Cities galaxy descends into town: Why new cities? I love Delhi, intermittently home for the past two decades. Many of my friends from Mumbai or Chennai or Bangalore don’t like it so much. I also love Punjab and UP and the cities in them that have given me both roots and wings and so many others that I travel to often. But do I want to live in all? A handful, perhaps. Do we really need spanking new cities, built from an idea of perfection that none of us identify with, much less want to live in? One of the greatest things about India is the madness of tradition and the warmth of its centuries-old haunts, which stand proud witness to its progress. Imagine having nothing familiar where you live, even if it is from a picture in a history book discarded long ago. Besides, why must change need a clean slate? This is why I feel AMRUT has so much more potential for transformation than just the idea of a Smart City. Is new always better or can the old lead a bold new way forward? The compatible immunology conundrum There are a lot of ideals we have built up our expectations to, as Bollywood, new media and cheaper travel takes us places we only imagined existed. From Europe to the US, Southeast Asia to Latin America, some wonderful examples of what our cities should look like are often jostling around for attention in our cynical Indian brains. What we often forget is that most of them made a lot of mistakes on their way to postcard-perfect snapshots that we now have the chance to avoid. Some ideas will work; others won’t. Heart or ‘brain’ transplants in Indian movies that defy all logic cannot be the solution to the urban mess we have created. Admittedly, some of them are smart merely by virtue of their sheer simplicity! But the basic immunology of each city needs to match the solution we seek to copy + paste. A ‘one size fits all’ model simply won’t do. Compulsive or selective surgery? The choice may just be ours. The problem with timid ambition Ambition, we have all been taught, has to begin with dreaming big. It sounds good: 100 Smart Cities and 600 under AMRUT. Neat numbers, admirable goal. But is it realistic? There’s nothing wrong with a national ambition that seeks to lift millions out of the drudgery of their daily lives, battling water and power shortages, flash traffic jams and faulty infrastructure. A tired, sleepless and constantly irritated nation can only do much, I say, but then that’s just me. Indian fables that we all grew up with offer us choices we’d be wise to make. We must, alternately, be the brave, diligent ant that carries many times its own weight to solve one problem; and as innovative as the crafty crow that dropped a few pebbles in a jar of water to take a thirsty sip.  Big ambition or targeted innovation? Both, I guess, for innovation can be the key to manage ambitions that often seem to defy all logic. Reinventing the wheel It’s the favourite Indian pastime, as we have proven only too often. Countless administrators are feted by the government, year after year, for the passion and innovation they bring to their jobs. Numerous examples of shining successes occupy fleeting space in our consciousness, only to dissipate as the wheel of transferable jobs chooses its next contestant, often to start the game all over again. Why can't we build a repository of tools and solutions to solve problems someone has already managed to tackle successfully? It's great that the next two days will showcase some of the best ideas from around the country. But are we listening? Or will we go back to the drawing board in a maddening loop that brings us back to the start by letting the ambitious pull of leaving our own legacy get the better of us? Defying definitions: Smart ≠ Tech One of the first questions I am asked when I meet people and introduce myself is: so, what is a smart city? For me, it’s freedom from frustration. I guess no one can quite define what it is. But we try. Still, as a friend’s blog headline says, “why cage it in description”? Last month I met a casual acquaintance who recently got married. I asked him how things were now that he was no longer living on his own, only to have him say: “Oh, great, now that I don’t have to get up to switch on the water motor at 5 am!”. A smart city for the woman who now does that for him, quite simply, is a place where no one has to get up at that ungodly hour and leave the bed to do something as simple as flick a switch. Technology can allow you to make it easier to flick that switch from your mobile phone, via a bunch of sensors and an alarm but, in fact, truly ‘smart’ would be doing away with the need for that switch altogether. Can we solve some problems offline first, before we rush to grab the best of what is ours for the taking anyway? I hope we can find the middle path that helps us navigate the tricky terrain of our journey to become a nation of smarter cities and I hope we make yet another dent in that mountain of a task tomorrow.