The much-hyped Golden Mile Project aimed at turning the arterial M.G. Road into a smart street equipped with advanced security, surveillance and communication technology remains a dream for the denizens.
The project supported by the Cisco Systems (India) has been mooted more than two years ago and the State government formally approved it as a Proof of Concept for Smart City project in 2015.
The project is aimed at providing certain facilities like free Wi-Fi to the public, smart parking facility, lighting, connected transport, kiosks on the M.G. Road and others including a comprehensive web portal and mobile application for the VMC, remote education and smart city data centre.
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However, not many of these objectives have been fulfilled by the firm so far. According to officials, so far an app called ‘Smart Vijayawada’ has been developed and made available on Google Play Store. It provides facilities available in the VMC’s smart governance app and additional facilities like information on car parking availability, the environment on the road, lighting, schools, the location of smart kiosks and others.
Also, the smart parking facility is still being tested at a single location near All India Radio. The real time lighting, parking and environment details could be currently seen on the app and the CM’s core dashboard.
As part of the project, the M.G. Road must be equipped with 92 HD video surveillance bullet cameras, nine PTZ cameras and 32 other components towards establishing safety, surveillance and communication systems.
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Lead partner
All the expertise and components worth ₹3.81 crore required for the project are being provided by Cisco, the lead partner of the project.
Also, the Cisco and the e-Centric have to provide online education programme to the students in municipal schools.
A couple of weeks ago, the Andhra Pradesh Urban Finance & Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited has released ₹1 crore out of its share of ₹3 crore . The VMC has earlier contributed its share of ₹62 lakh for the project which is worth ₹7.83 crore.