What's the progress on Jaipur's Rs 2400 crore smart city mission?

When the government announced the first set of Smart Cities in January, Bhubaneshwar topped the pecking order, followed by Pune, Jaipur, Surat, and Kochi. Business Today spent 24 hours in Jaipur trying to figure out its progress. It emerges that the city's quest towards smartness preceded the Central government's Smart Cities Mission by six years. It is one of the few Indian cities where a clutch of smart projects have already taken off.

There are two broad smart city movements in the city today - one headed by the Jaipur Development Authority (JDA) and the second by Jaipur Smart City Limited, the SPV formed to take forward the union government's mission. Most of JDA's initiatives are independent of the proposals Jaipur Smart City Limited will undertake in the coming months, but all of them form an important fulcrum towards making the overall city smarter. JDA's smart city projects, which also includes security camera installations, among others, were worth Rs 18 crore in phase one (October 2015), Rs 24 crore in phase two (April 2016), and will cost Rs 39 crore in the third phase. While these projects are important, they appear minuscule when compared to the size of projects Jaipur Smart City Limited plans to undertake in the walled city - old Jaipur - under the Smart Cities Mission. The investment totals to about Rs 2,400 crore, but important projects, such as the one that deals with facade improvement of 16 old bazars, are at a very early stage. We will know how Jaipur has progressed on these probably a year from now. JDA, in the meantime, has pressed the accelerator on many counts.

Bikaner House, Delhi

Business Today met the Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje, over lunch. "Cities becoming smart is about reacting to people and their demands. To be able to give them that makes a lot of difference to their quality of life," she says.

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Her first efforts with smartness started in 2007/ 08, during her first stint as the state's Chief Minister. She asked herself three questions: "What can we do that is going to be very new, very different, and very useful?" Technology was the answer. On the advice of Mohandas Pai, the former Director of IT services firm Infosys and the current Chairman of Manipal Global Education, she came up with the Bhamashah Card which is linked to a bank account and used for transferring cash benefits directly to the beneficiary, as well as for non-cash benefits of various government schemes. Like the Aadhaar programme, it preceded the Central government scheme by a few years.

"The idea was to make women responsible members of the society, and give them a certain amount of respect. So the card would be in the name of the woman," says the CM who is called "madam" by her babus. "They had to start using the card, the POS machine, the biometrics - they learnt. Today, 4.65 crore people are already on the card."

It was a state scheme but over time, Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, became smarter as well. There were Wi-Fi in public places, security camera installations, kiosks to help tourists, and more greenery.

Mahal Road, Jaipur

This is where Jaipur's first brush with smart lighting happened. A two-kilometre stretch on Mahal Road is now fitted with 320 fixtures, each with 45 LEDs. In the last three months, 97 megawatt hours (Mwh) were saved, compared to conventional LEDs. How's that? The current smart lighting infrastructure of the JDA has motion detection and dimming capabilities. In other words, the LEDs can be programmed to dim when there is little traffic movement, saving energy. Currently, if there is no 'traffic activity' on this stretch of Mahal Road for a minute, the lights dim to 20 per cent of its total luminance. There are also four video nodes attached to the fixtures that count the number of vehicles entering and exiting the road, detect traffic violations and alert JDA authorities.

"LEDs on the 1 km-stretch cost us Rs 25 lakh, whereas smarter fixtures cost Rs 49 lakh. But we can recover this money within one and a half years," says Vaibhav Galriya, Jaipur Development Commissioner. In its next phase, JDA has planned 45-km of smart lights.

JDA office, Jaipur

The smart lighting features of Mahal Road currently integrate with Cisco's 'City Digital Platform'. The platform can pull in data from different operations in a city and provide a dashboard view to the mayor, or the authority. At present, it integrates traffic, parking and environment data, apart from lighting. A map shows parking availability, environment sensors in 15 locations of the city send back data on humidity, noise, temperature, CO2, and NO2. Going ahead, this data could be opened up for start-ups to use or analyse. The environment data may facilitate policy making, too.

Inside the JDA office is also the city's Network Operations Centre (NOC). A larger NOC is under construction on the ground floor, but as of now, a smaller room on the second floor is crowded with video walls. Over its three phases, JDA has installed 350 cameras in 35 locations in the city. These are high-definition, 5-MP cameras that can zoom unto 100 metres to identify objects or people. Live feed plays on these video walls, and records are maintained for a month.

At present, the dashboard does not integrate data from these cameras. However, Cisco executives say, going ahead, the city platform could integrate data from waste management initiatives, transport, and metering solutions. Much of this data available on the dashboard will also be available to citizens soon. A citizen app will be released in January 2017. Tourist information, JDA services, information on environment and parking availability, grievance redressal and other smart city solutions are the features of this app - akin to citizen apps developed in European countries such as Barcelona.

The progress made towards being smarter has helped Jaipur join the elite list, one that includes Hamburg, Barcelona and Adelaide. It is Cisco's 'Lighthouse City' - an internal adage it uses for cities where governance, administration, bureaucracy and city plans converge well enough for it to become a smart city. The company invests resources in pilots and global knowledge sharing, among others in such cities. As part of the Lighthouse account, Cisco, along with 3M and Genpact, has set up a 'Global Centre of Excellence' in the city. That's a co-innovation lab working on Internet of Everything-based solutions. In short, it is meant to keep Jaipur ahead of the curve.