Shortly after Bengaluru made what could be its last pitch at making it to the “smart city” list, a workshop organised by the Smart Cities India Foundation here on Wednesday made a bid at roping in startups in the process of strengthening digital and telecommunications in the city, as well as batting for adoption of Internet of Things (IOT) in civic governance.
Bengaluru has failed to make it to the smart city list of the Centre earlier and recently submitted its proposal to vie for the last 19 spots left.
“The field of IoT is very large and complex and it involves inputs and data collection from various departments of the government. Our main motive will be to tackle these challenges and come up with novel solutions,” Gaurav Gupta, Principal Secretary, Depaartment of IT/BT said on Wednesday.
Kiran Kuchi from the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, said the vast use of IoT allows water and electricity to be monitored in the smart way by establishing a communication module between the meter and the utility, which should ideally cost 10% of the overall charge in fixing the meters and such technology was readily available. Offering an example, he spoke about the smart water monitoring in Spain where narrowband IoT technology was used to study water leakage and succeeding to a large extent.
For Bengaluru, the example cited was a pilot project started off in Electronics City recently where “smart street lamps” were installed with sensors which can reduce or increase the intensity of light depending on the density of the crowd on the road.
“Data is oil and the city should use this to its maximum potential to analyse and come up with models which can be implemented throughout the city without glitches and harness the maximum benefit out of the data that is collected. In a city like Bengaluru, there is interplay of different systems and the need for correlation grows stronger every moment and once this is achieved then we will automatically fit into the smart standards,” said Bharadwaj Amrutur from the Indian Institute of Science.
