At the outset, I thank BW Businessworld for organizing this virtual conference on Smart cities. Earlier also, organizations and institutions organized similar pattern webinar but this concept gained popularity and is been given due credit courtesy the COVID 19 pandemic which forced mankind to practice social distancing. The concept not only enables connecting with experts in the domain from across the world but also helped us in laying down and document the best practices from across the domain. We have been able to connect with so many eminent stakeholders from across the domain of Smart Cities, Swachcha Bharat and others, digitally and never felt that the public output system is not working optimally and are working in close co-ordination to make it a citizen centric model. As a matter of fact that is the smart functioning method to set things in right order within the Government ecosystem.

When the Smart City Mission was launched on 25th of June 2015, our Hon’ble Prime Minister, Narendra Modi emphasized on two very crucial points. Firstly, it is very important for a nation like us to churn out more and more from less or whatever resources are available—namely, whatever volume of water, energy, and power is available, it is important to satisfy citizens with amenities out of it. And, for that it is not only the infrastructure which is important but the method of using the infrastructure is also severely crucial. 

Secondly, our PM also emphasizes in the fact that our citizens are at the core and it is the government’s prime focus to provide supreme living conditions to our citizens, under any circumstances. It is the people who make the cities inhabitable and they must be most satisfied in this case. It is for this aim, that the smart city mission has been set by the government to enable better living conditions for people.

It is very crucial to identify the new challenges and opportunities that Smart Cities has opened up during the COVID 19 pandemic to mitigate the challenges. We have about 42 Integrated Command and Control Center (ICCC) and another one added in the past couple of weeks, which are an integral part of Smart city projects and have been a great medium to damage control the pandemic been created by COVID 19. As a matter of fact, all of these command and control centers have been converted into COVID war-rooms. They have played a crucial role in managing data to be rightly available for citizens and also for government to serve people of needs and emergencies at the right hour and right place, including monitoring and predicting of recovery and mortality rate at places due to the pandemic; in collaboration with healthcare, academia and science and technology departments of state governments.

On the other hand the government is focusing on building a contact-less mode of operation at all levels in the state government to break the COVID 19 chain. India has a robust 700 kms of operational metro rail in 18 major cities and a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) network of about 450 kms operational in 11 cities carrying 10 million passengers daily. But due to the social distancing norms being practiced, their capacities would be utilised at 25 to 50 per cent of pre-coronavirus levels. Such dramatic and dynamic changes in demand and supply will require complementing these public transport systems with alternative modes of transit.

It is imperative at this stage that transmission of infection through usage of public transport should be curbed by adopting the right "sanitisation, containment and social distancing measures".
 
 Touchless system like BHIM, PhonePe, Google Pay, PayTM and National Common Mobility Card (NCMC) will reduce human interaction in operations of public transit systems," the advisory said. The advisory also citied instances of world cities promoting non-motorised transport in view of the COVID-19 crisis.

As a matter of fact, the COVID pandemic has not only left the citizens much concerned in their social behaviour with responsibility but also turned cities cleaner with more vigorous door to door collection being done in present times.