Arvinder Bali
Smart city is an emerging concept in India to accommodate the booming urban population. India is facing one of the biggest challenging situation of people’s migration to the urban areas. It is expected that in next ten years more than 350 million people of Indian population will be moving to the cities. Owing to such large scale urbanisation, there is going to be water scarcity, traffic congestion, energy shortage, healthcare, law and order issues and shortage of other resources. Economic experts have predicted that India needs to build at least 500 new cities to accommodate such massive migration. Keeping in view urbanisation explosion, the government is trying to address these issues by embarking on large infrastructure projects and new smart cities initiatives. India is planning to build modern cities with a good master plan meeting the fundamental requirements of Indians, which will ensure continuous water, electricity supply, transport facility, walkways, public information, grievance redressal, smart health, smart governance, smart safety and security of citizens. Smart City is a green movement to create wealth for common citizens by increasing economic growth and to improve quality of life of common Indian across pan India. Smart city concept attributes to IT, communication, digitisation and innovative
technology.
India is planning to build nations first mega infrastructure project (DMIC corridor) with an estimated cost of 100 billion dollars which will be about 1,500 km long. On both sides of the project, twenty six new smart cities will be built up which will change lives of citisens for ever in these cities. The project will have nine Mega industrial hubs which will be spread over 200-250 sq km areas with three ports, six airports and six lane intersection free expressways. The plan is to run high speed trains from Dadri (near Greater Noida) to Jawahar Lal Nehru Port in Mumbai for carrying goods from one city to another to reduce the logistic cost from 14 per cent to 6 per cent of GDP. The covering distance would be around 1,485 Km.
Smart cities would require smart grids and power plants for electrification of all households and industries. The power in smart cities will be generated by waste management, rain water harvesting and recycling technologies. Smart grid will interconnect generation, transmission and distribution systems to transfer power reliably and economically by managing power during peak load, enabling operators to track real time power conditions, analyze power quality and reliability on a real time basis to take decisions quickly for better use of energy assets. A smart grid in a smart city will be controlling and monitoring power demand and energy consumption through smart meters. This will also allow consumers to interact with grid on real time basis by receiving automatic energy loss calculation by SMS or email. Successful implementation of smart grid is going to have a huge impact on reduction of Green House gases in making India a greener destination.
Our motherland J and K is also expected to face rapid urbanisation in the next ten years; smart cities are the critical need of the hour in the State. We are also required to use the power of technology to use our resources smartly. We need to develop a city wide network to optimise online information on the basic services like water, traffic, health care, environment, e-governance etc. The smart cities will really reshape the urban landscape in our State. However, the government has laid down a few criteria on the basis of which these smart cities will be chosen. The basic criteria is that those cities which have shown the capability of being smart, the cities which have shown certain examples of doing infrastructure development will be given priority for being selected as smart city. So, for achieving the economic progress and to improve the quality of life, it is imperative for us to become part of the development race.
Let us pledge to go green and make smart cities a reality for sustainable development of our motherland.