Smart city is now not a question of if, but a question of how & when. What vision is needed in the making of a Smart City?

Smart City is one of the hottest buzzwords, especially in India today. There are plenty of meanings floating, right from various levels of government, real-estate builders, IT companies and general people. A smart city is a digitally connected city, offering critical services to its people ensuring a sustainable economy and smarter, leaner governance.

A major interest is driven from the government side. The governments want to provide sustainable and growth oriented economic environment in their respective region, by provisioning top class infrastructure. A smart city brings operational efficiency and centralized control for the government as well as local authorities. It provisions real-time information combining intelligence, augments new services to its citizens, maintains order by proactively and reactively safeguarding public and is capable of improving its quality and scale over time. Needy infrastructure services for citizens such as safety, utility, health, emergency, traffic, communication are controlled, actioned and brained by IT, the underlying foundation for smart city. Such projects are a need of the hour for India, as this uplifts our domestic economy, cuts redundant government spending, drives efficiency in all infrastructure sectors and make citizens more productive and prosperous.

From the real-estate point of view, for large builders constructing townships, societies, commercial or education campuses, the smart-city equals better living, vigilance, new service amenities and residents collaboration through centralized monitoring and management.

A smart city is therefore a combination of “Monitoring, Action and Intelligence” that constantly influences the quality of services to the citizen. The underlying physical infrastructure that provides critical services is digitized by the layer of IT infrastructure.

A smart city is fully connected by primarily fiber or wireless technology. The information collection happens centrally at a data center and is primarily managed, viewed at a centralized command center. It is also an aggregation of multiple systems that exchange data among themselves.  The key IT driving forces of “Social Media”, “Mobility”, “Cloud” and “Analytics” along with Internet of Things and Information Security have direct role in implementing a smart city. Thus system integrators, who have very strong IT infrastructure experience as well as sensor based technology expertise are the right companies for the Smart City.

Allied, being a strong infrastructure services and solutions provider over 30 years and a master systems integrator undoubtedly possesses the right experience, skills and project implementation agility to be best positioned to implement smart city projects. It has been therefore awarded the first such project of a smart city initiative, the city of Pune by implementing critical services of citizen safety and traffic management. This project is now operational and providing great value for improving law and order of the city.