Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 100 smart cities plan is a positive step to help Indian cities harness innovation to stay dynamic and safe for their citizens and businesses. With significant migration to the cities (~ 35 per cent of India’ population, and contributing to ~ 60 per cent of GDP are city dwellers), there is increasing strain on traffic, transportation systems, power plants, water supply networks, waste management units, amongst others. There is also an increasing need for smart cities that is efficient and sustainable.

A smart city would allow city officials to interact with community, infrastructure, as events occur and evolve. We have witnessed in recent times, thriving ecosystem that has sprung up to offer analytics to enable smart city officials to manage operations efficiently. Analytics can be utilized in various areas such as:-

1. Predict where crimes (theft, woman safety among others) are likely to take place through historical, geographical data, and develop citizen safety measures
2. Map infrastructure outcomes of any use of space with high degree of accuracy
3. Build efficient transportation network with higher reliability by predicting peak times and help the network cope.  
4. Assist city planners in developing sustainable growth plan by learning about areas that are likely to become popular and upgrade amenities to accommodate.
5. Effective public spending to help us identify where the impact is likely to be the highest and reduce wastage.
6. Drive compliance, and counter fraud across many areas of jurisdiction, including taxation, waste and water management.
7. Generate actionable intelligence for agricultural sector using precision data to help improve yield.
8. Internet provisioning to ensure that all citizens have adequate internet access and speed, essentially prioritize bandwidth to help achieve optimum level for users in residential and commercial areas

It is widely accepted that main beneficiary of analytics has been the technology sector.  With it slowly pervading across multiple sectors, citizens are likely to experience the profound impact of analytics by having their lives more secure and simplified. This could also raise concerns about Orwellian snooping by the state, unless citizens are assured that it is entirely focused on improving lives, generating economic prosperity, and securing their data. All constituents (Government, businesses, entrepreneurs) need to work together to deliver these anticipated synergies.

(Views are personal; feel free to write to Chandu ([email protected]) for any query around analytics)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article above are those of the authors' and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of this publishing house