CISCO is acing India’s Smart City plan with a unique approach!

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CISCO is acing India’s Smart City plan with a unique approach!
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Each city has its own local solutions. One just need to identify it, accept it and scale it.

“Why do we need to make India Barcelona? India has its own beauty and its own charm. If we improve the quality of life, that will make the people happy and lead to a lot more peaceful life,” said Aamer Azeemi, Managing Director, CISCO Systems India.

He cited various practices which they have already implemented in cities in India.

One of the major pilot projects which were implemented fairly successfully is the local information kiosk in Mantri mall in Electronic City, Bangalore.

“A citizen can walk into the Mantri mall and lodge an FIR,” he informed. This eases the process of lodging FIR by an ordinary individual through this centre instead of the tiring process to go to a Police station to do the same.
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The six month-old project is a two-way conversation system with the police officer sitting at the call centre. Public grievances and complaints can be addressed in real time now. Further, one police can now monitor large areas at the same time. This solves the major problem of limited police resources available for the public.

“This is a perfect example of having the services come to where the citizens are instead of the citizens having to go to where the services are,” said Azeemi.

That’s what being ‘Smart’ is!

The Government of Karnataka is about to implement this pilot project in different areas in the state. Jaipur too is likely to follow suit, he added.

The other discussion that Cisco is having with the government of Karnataka is to expand the service of the kiosk to other citizen services too.
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“Very soon you will see that various services are offered through that particular kiosk across places in India,” told Aamer.

The second thing is to improve the quality of life. Cisco did lot of studies and found that even the perception of safety increases the taxes of a place. If CCTVs are installed, people get a notion that the place is safe.

“Whether it is actually safe or not is a different question but people would come and want to live in it and the property price will go up which in turn would increase the tax and hence the government would earn more money to leverage into the mission,” he said.

Cisco also has implemented successfully smart parking, smart street lighting, use of wi-fi in Electronic City, Bangalore, to demonstrate that one can actually do these on a broader area, not only on a single street like what was done in the niche of Barcelona.

(Image credits: Indiatimes)