Smart person is a Quick Learner, a Doer, a Situation Aware and Responsive Person. All of these attributes of smart person can help us draw insights into, what a
smart city or a smart community should BE like ?
Just like a sensible and aware person is well informed, a city also needs
to have awareness and sensing nervous system.
Like a Yogi who is disciplined in
practice;
Like a military officer well trained with task execution which committed to
his muscle memory by training, And
Like mother caring yet strict for well being of
citizen(children),
similar should be the nature of the City Governance.
It should be aware,trained, caring yet strict.
Thus a smart city in essence is healthy,
disciplined and caring service oriented organism. The citizen's love and liking
insures that there exists discipline, and hence city'as holistic health is maintained.
The making of smart city is a quest to make existing undisciplined, untrained and
socially uneducated citizens to change there behavior is a significant challenge. Here in
lies the need to define essence of smart city.
Firstly the philosophy of a smart
city has to be well defined for a given city. The citizens will realign, commit for the
change given they are assured of benefits. There alignment is guaranteed only if benefits are assured, tangible and well accounted.
Secondly ones the commitment is made there is a need to
improve awareness of city inputs, outputs, value generation and cost expended
for survival / thriving of city. Citizen need to be aware of cost of
development lest some environmentalist may hijack the progress agenda.
In
modern and scientifically bent world, it is mandatory that each decision for
change is piloted, tested and decided with fair idea of risks and returns. Hence
the decision making needs to be well backed by DATA.
This need for data and information based decision making
is critical for success. Majority of citizens may appear to be irrational but
the journey of rationality is through educative and open information sharing.
We from ICT world believe that IT has significant part in making city aware and
smart.
Dream or the intent for governing entities has been to
make India developed. And smart city initiative is pilot plant for this change.
The change is expected to make a diverse / outwardly undisciplined giant
nation, into a thriving developed nation. For this data collection, best
practices sharing, even context around best practice and finally citizen livelihood metrics needs to be tracked in
disciplined, timely manner.
All concepts of Ashtanga yoga read as "Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi" Apply.
Samadhi being paragon of success, may be the state of hypothetical city of atlantis.
The Data collection (swadhya), Data analysis( manthan) , Commitment ( sankalpa)
and finally Execution ( tapas). In all of this data documentation, data metrics definition and associated
rationale need to be published openly and in near real time. Just to highlight some audit report of Municipal Corporation are published 2-3 years after the financial year closure.
This is the challenge for IT world, to support this end to end process with
best of data analytics technology available in world to brought nation's
service at reasonable cost with good quality of service assurance.
We in persistent having strong data analytics foot print
are committed to contribute our share(squirrel's share).
