The Essel group is planning to adopt a revenue sharing model for developing smart cities, Chairman Subhas Chandra said here on Thursday.
Although best known for its entertainment and media business, the Essel group is involved in diverse sectors such as education, wellness, infrastructure, manufacturing, gold refining and financial services.
The group has already signed a memorandum of understanding with the Madhya Pradesh Government for developing five smart cities. A month ago, it moved the West Bengal Government to develop a smart city in the state.
“Our model is a public-private-partnership, and rests on the premise of growing the city’s economy so as to maximise revenue with a revenue-sharing formula,” he said at a media interaction.
The group hopes to be able to showcase its first smart city within two years of signing a definite agreement with the Madhya Pradesh Government. Essel would take up only cities with a population of over five lakh for this initiative, he said, adding that a smart city was all about giving uninterrupted services to citizens through smart governance and better surveillance. Much before the word smart city gained coinage, Essel had developed smart utilities as an integrated utilities brand for consumer-centric service-oriented brand, he said. Pointing out that West Bengal offered immense business potential in sectors such as roads, hydel energy, and power distribution, he said Essel was trying to help the government address certain policy issues.
Media businessOn the group’s media business, Mr. Chandra said Zee Entertainment Services now had 928 million viewers, offering content in local languages. It was available in Russia,
Indonesia and the Arab world among 170 destinations. Efforts were on to develop content in Spanish and Portuguese for Latin American countries. “The target is to have 1.4 billion viewers by 2020,” he said.
