E-Governance, the Best Bet For Smart Cities’ Builders
The idea of a Smart City
There cannot really be a single definition of smart city. The connotation may differ from nation to nation or even region to region, depending on the local residents’ level of understanding of development. Therefore, creating a comprehensive e-Governance solution for smart cities is a complex business.
The objective is to create cities with core infrastructure that can give its citizens a decent living standard, which also includes a clean and sustainable environment. And the strategy is to improve governance of cities through area-based development; a governance that cumulatively adds to the layers of smartness.
The challenges
The task before urban planners — to be able to cater to the needs and aspirations of people — is to build up an infrastructure that is sound in all aspects — institutionally, physically, socially and economically. A long term goal that is.
The first challenge before governments is the growing costs of infrastructure. Secondly, the number of IT savvy citizens is increasing rapidly, resulting into a change in the type of their demands. Thirdly, they are falling short of IT staff to manage the enormous data flowing in every hour through multiple systems. To create a budget required to provide for an e-Governance solution for smart cities in such a situation is a daunting task for governments.
The Economic Times’ realty section, for instance, listed down more challenges, after the Government of India announced its plan of a 100 smart cities a couple of years ago.
1. Identifying, in the existing cities, the weak areas that need urgent attention. For example: Bad roads, or water supply.
2. The finance. The smart projects depend largely on private investments or PPPs. How does the government plan to manage all that at this scale?
3. There is no master plan available for 80% of cities. How will the government put together, plan, and implement things in a smart city without a master development plan?
4. How does the government plan to recover the costs incurred while supplying services through its ULBs? Without a genius plan into place, the government is sure to face financial losses.
5. The administration needs to put into place a complete e-Governance solution for smart cities in order to make utility services extremely reliable. The idea of a smart city is to have universal access to power 24X7. Secondly, to provide for power, it needs a shift towards renewable resources and more environment friendly measures. How does the government plan to make it at such enormous scale?
How e-Governance solutions will help?
The key to tackling these problems lies in innovative technology. Governments, by giving a face-lift to their existing legacy system, can integrate highly effective solutions that go ahead of just automating core services. The E-Governance solutions for smart cities will allow governments to create a strong and reliable base for information exchange that is also flexible enough to be customized to suit the local factors of varied regions. A seamless interaction will then aid in smooth decision making in the government.
e-Governance solutions providers gain expertise from their associations with multiple government agencies. The solutions they make are constantly improved to ensure a resource planning that percolates down from a mere technology level to the workforce at ground level.
