App-smart Times
Prashant Chaudhary,
Senior Director, Sales-Government, CA Technologies
ICT can definitely be leveraged to make all aspects of a city’s infrastructure smart. IT plays an important role in roads and transportation, i.e. to track movement and check violations. Most of the states have been using technology-based public service delivery, but it has to move to the next level now. Citizens have to be a part of this. The communication has to be two way. If a city is able to cater to the needs of citizens, they should also participate in the activities. We are living in an ‘App world’, where every mobile user has more than 10 Apps in his/her mobile. We are moving from traditional way to smart way. In a smart city, we should get access to all Apps related to social and IT-enabled infrastructure. The application economy means opening up the business. Architecture of smart cities will include domain applications and core applications. CA Security Solutions provide ICT framework for these smart cities.
Digital Empowerment
Puneet Ahuja,
Senior Technical Consultant, Juniper Networks
Making a smart city is building a city, which is not yet developed, and empowering it with digital infrastructure. It must be connecting everything to everything and have data analytics for smart decision-making. Digital empowerment will help provide governance and services on demand. To achieve this, real time collection of data is important using technology. It will require robust, agile, scalable and automated information infrastructure. This will consist of devices, network and data centre. Gram panchayats should also benefit from smart cities. It will require an integrated and scalable infrastructure that is an enabler for all services while providing carrier-grade reliability, operational simplicity and cost-effectiveness at large-scale with excellent quality of service. In smart cities, data centre has to work on cloud system to Analyse, Optimise and Virtualise the information.
Safety First
Hirdesh Kumar Singh,
Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of Jammu & Kashmir
The Smart City is presumed to be a safe city. Today, common people face a lot of hassles even in getting their caste certificates or birth-death certificates from their municipalities. They have to visit offices of the authorities concerned several times. Since everybody has smartphones nowadays, there should be Information Technology-enabled services or mobile apps, through which any person can get certificates easily. It will also curtail corruption in the long run. Kashmir is more beautiful than Switzerland and everybody wants to visit Kashmir, but safety remains a concern in the State. To reduce those routine frisking, we should use chip technology. For example, there must be some technology with the Transport Department that enables its officials to keep a track or check people without stopping them. Although several schemes have been launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, people should take initiatives on their own too.
Technology for Safety
Saurabh Bhagat,
Secretary, Department of Consumer Affairs & Public Distribution, Government of Jammu & Kashmir
India has the largest public distribution system, which needs to be made more efficient employing various technological tools. Movement of food grains to the Food Corporation of India storage, then making its way to various city stores to the last PDS shop, all this requires a lot of technology or GPS systems. Moreover, after the Nirbhaya incident took place, a lot of technology has come into use. The Government has made it mandatory that every vehicle that carries female passenger has to have CCTV surveillance, and no vehicle can be registered by the Transport Commissioner and RTOs unless the provision of CCTV is there. In addition, in J&K, all the other provisions of CCTNS are being implemented. So, technology will definitely make our cities smarter. The concept of Smart Cities is organic and is evolving and it is expected that more and more variables will keep joining it.