open source consortium for smart cities india

Open Source Consortium forSmart Cities India

© 2015 Persistent Systems Ltd. All rights reserved. 1

P O I N T O FV I E W

Introduction By 2030, approximately 600 million Indians will be living in cities. Indian cities are

burdened with increasing demand for energy, water & housing, pollution & traffic

issues, infrastructure & resource constraints. These existing challenges coupled with

massive urbanization will put tremendous pressure on cities' existing resources.

Therefore, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the government has

announced a flagship program, 'Smart Cities'. It aims to address challenges

associated with India's rapid growth and massive urbanization in coming years. As part

of the program, the government has decided to develop 100 Smart Cities by 2024.

Building smart cities will involve development of technology solutions coupled with

urban infrastructure & connectivity that can address cities' growth aspirations and offer

employment opportunities to its citizens. Moreover, it should be within regulatory

framework of the government and must adhere to common industry standards. It

should also facilitate participation from various sections of society. Smart city

development is not just a technology problem but it also entails facilitation of inclusive

environment where stakeholders can co-create, adapt, grow, manage and sustain

rapid urbanization.

A technology solution for smart city development will help administrators to enhance

resource utilization via real-time monitoring and informed decision making based on

usage analytics. Many cities in India are already undergoing smart transformation and

deploying such solutions. However, it should have India-centric approach. Indian

society, diversity, history, political influences, regional alignments, and resource

availability pose different challenges in urbanization. It may result in different usage and

adaptation of smart solutions. These unique issues may not be comparable to other

smart cities in the world.

With many domestic and foreign stakeholders at various levels, there is a bigger need

to bring in common consensus, inclusive environment and open standards based

platform. It will eliminate issues associated with dependency on vendor, proprietary

technology stack, scalability and cost. Our point of view focuses on the need to have

India-centric, inclusive and open environment which will pave the way for development

of an open platform for smart city development. It calls for wider collaboration between

government, academia, private sector, technology providers and citizens to build a

solution based on standards via an open-source consortium for smart cities in India.

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S M A R T C I T I E S

Contents

Introduction.............................1

Vision for 100 Smart Cities.......................................2

Current Smart Solutions & Challenges............................. 4

India Smart City Value Creation in Open Way.............6

Smart City Open PlatformIndia Consortium.....................7

Conclusion..............................9

“Indian cities are

estimated to

accommodate 590

million people by 2030

which could generate

70% net new jobs,

produce more than 70%

of Indian GDP, and drive

a new fourfold increase

in per capita income

across the nation”.

– McKinsey Global 1Institute (MGI)


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Government of India's Vision for 100 Smart Cities31% of urban population in India contributes to 60% India's GDP based on global urbanization

patterns, pace of urbanization is typically very rapid from 30% to 60-65%. Therefore, India is

currently at very strategic point where it is going to witness sudden and rapid exodus from rural to

urban area. This urban growth is expected to contribute to 75% of India's GDP in next 15 years.iMGI estimates following growth opportunities by 2030:

70% net new employment

68 cities will have population 1+ million, 590 million people will live in cities

700-900 million square meters of commercial and residential space required

2.5 billion sq m of roads and 7400 Km of metros and subways to be constructed

$1.2 trillion capital investment required to meet projected demands in cities

These overwhelming numbers will put tremendous pressure on policy makers to handle numerous

challenges regarding urban infrastructure, conservation of energy, fuel & natural resources,

overcrowding, pollution, and overall economy of the city. Following the footprints of other global

cities, India too has decided to leverage information and communication technology (ICT) in order

to address these urbanization challenges. During the maiden budget in July 2014, government has

announced its plan to develop 100 Smart Cities in the country by 2024.

What is a Smart City?

Every country has defined its own context and framework of a

smart city. Government of India defines a smart city as,

Smart cities are those cities which have intelligent social,

physical, institutional and economic infrastructure while

ensuring centrality of citizens in a sustainable environment.

Its sustainability needs to offer economic activities,

employment opportunities and quality of life to a wide section

of its residents, regardless of their level of education, skills or

income levels.

Institutional infrastructure: Activities and systems related to e-governance, planning, and

processes that lead to better management of a city via use of ICT.

Physical infrastructure: Urban infrastructure of systems like energy, water supply, sewage, iisolid waste management, etc. integrated through use of ICT .

Social Infrastructure: Activities towards developing the human and social capital in areas such

as education, healthcare, entertainment, etc.

Economic Infrastructure: Ability of city to attract investments, generate funds and facilitate

necessary business environment to create required growth opportunities.

During the maiden

budget in July 2014,

Government of India has

announced its plan to

develop 100 Smart Cities

in the country by 2024.

Funds amounting to

7600 crores ($1.24

billion USD) have been

allocated for this 2program.


Smart technology solution will make institutional infrastructure more efficient, transparent and

accountable via integration and monitoring of physical infrastructure. However, it also requires

development of social infrastructure via investment in education and healthcare sectors. Finally, a

city has to create sustainable economic infrastructure so that smart city development becomes an

incremental activity generating further employment avenues. Based on these four pillars,

following are the key areas identified in smart cities development:

How the Government plans to rollout 100 Smart Cities?100 Smart Cities will be shortlisted based on criteria like economic sustainability (GDP

contribution), geographic inclusivity, cultural heritage, diversity, etc. This effort also intends to

prioritize other flagship programs of government, e.g. Swachh Bharat, Make in India and Digital

India. The implementation is based on 3 key approaches:

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mRetrofitting smart technology solution or overhaul of existing solutions in existing cities to achieve near term objective

High-speed connectivity, CCTV surveillance intelligent traffic and parking management

Timeline: 3 years

Area to be covered per city: 500+ acers

Retrofitting Redevelopment Green-field Township

Developing a completely new township on vacant lands which follows all norms of true smart city.

Timeline: 10 years


Creating new colonies and commercial areas within a city limit.

Feature like green and efficient buildings, wide and monitored roads, recreational, open spaces etc.

Timeline: 5 years


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iiICT is the backbone of every smart technology solution. However, “one-size-fits-all” strategy will

not work for all approaches as each one poses a different technology challenge e.g. retrofitting a

technology solution based on existing crammed infrastructure will be more costly than similar

scale, grounds up deployment in green-field town ship. Solutions have to be flexible and adaptable

to different ways of retrofitting to serve the need. And yet, quality and ease of use cannot be

compromised. This plan cannot be a mere policy decision by the government leading to assembly

of various smart solutions. Neither can it be an implementation mandate from central level

percolating down to municipal bodies. It's a complex equation of infrastructure, available

resources, technology, regulations, cost, participation and change in the ways cities have been

executing. Evolution of smart solutions, current status quo and challenges of integrating these

solutions in Indian context to address the massive and ambitious scale need different approach.

Current Smart Solutions & ChallengesSmart solutions range from broad platform approach to niche solutions for specific problems.

Vendor-specific Platforms: Smart city platform from leading vendors like IBM and Cisco

address many areas like water, energy, and building. These are horizontal solutions

encompassing many proprietary technology solutions bundled together.

Niche Solutions: On the other end of the spectrum, there are solutions targeting specific area

and focusing on providing specific solutions. E.g. Eutech Cybernetic for smart workplace

solutions, Petra Systems for smart lightening and smart surveillance.

Selection of smart solutions depends on certain questions that policy makers must answer: What is

your city's ecosystem in terms of needs, priorities, funds, infrastructure, policies, timeline, and

socio-economic reasons? What key problems are you trying to solve? What are immediate gains

and long term vision? How much budget is allocated? Is the solution for some other city really going

to address problems of your city?

Once solutions are chosen and projects are initiated, more challenges start surfacing, such as

interoperability of solutions, data ownership, vendor lock-in, scale of implementation, open access,

citizen's adoption of these technologies resulting in more user generated data and so on. Following

section elaborates on each of these challenges and how it multiplies in the Indian context. Broadly

these challenges can be categorized as hard challenges driven by technology and soft challenges

driven by adoption or governance mechanism.

Smart cities' technology

market will grow from $6.1

billion annually in 2012 to

more than $20 billion in 2020

at a compound annual

growth rate (CAGR) of

16.2%. This represents a

cumulative investment of

over $117 billion in smart

city technologies between

2012 and 2020.4-Navigant Research

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As of 2013, there are 40+

countries with

government open data

platforms, 90,000+

datasets on data.gov

(US), 1 million+ dataset

made open by

governments worldwide –

all of this resulting in $3

trillion potential annual

value enabled by open

data in seven domain.6-McKinsey Global Institute

A truly smart city

requires horizontal

integration as well as

creating a system of

systems capable of

achieving considerable

increase in efficiency and

generating new

opportunities for the city

and its citizen. 5-IEC

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HARD CHALLENGES (CAN BE TACKLED WITH TECHNOLOGY EFFICIENCY):

THE “REMOTE CONTROL”

SYNDROME

Complexity of every city's ecosystem plays a significant role in implementation of smart solutions. Every individual project has its merit within terent service silos e.g. energy, parking, traffic management. It would lead to heterogeneous data formats and inconsistent visualization. Such user experience is analogous to using many “remote controls” simultaneously to operate different devices at a time. It would also result in increased cost of training and maintenance.

DATA FRAGMENTATION

At implementation level, a smart solution is based on technology paradigm of “Internet of Things” (IoT) where things denote various types of sensors deployed in cities' infrastructure connected via network and passing of data using the communication protocol. These “connected” things pass real-time data e.g. water purification system's quality levels, open parking spaces indicators, and waste containers' filling level. There would be thousands of sensors sending real-time data that enable speedy decision making. However, 'remote control' syndrome would naturally lead to fragmentation of real-time data in various smart solution at city level. This would further culminate in fragmentation at region, state and eventually national level. Obtaining holistic view of data (to perform analysis and lead to better prediction, optimization and efficiency) would lead to very complex integration effort.

INTEGRATION AND INTEROPERABILITY

ISSUES

Sensors are of different types (location, thermal, acoustic, light and chemical) and they use different communication protocol to transmit data (wifi, Bluetooth, RFID, and Zigbee). Vendor-specific solution provide proprietary interfaces to interact with it. Interoperability between these systems is a key challenge for integrated smart city. This challenge manifests in a very complex scenario when data from multiple smart solution, from different vendors, diverse environment, and multiple government organizations needs to be integrated.

DATA LOCKED IN CLOSED SYSTEMS

Access to real-time and citizen generated data in smart city is very critical since it will help city administrators to take informed policy decisions. Open data can create new value chains, encourage innovation and transparency. Many governments worldwide have shared vital data freely to citizens, businesses, and academics creating new value chains, products, and business models. Following this global trend of open data, Government of India also makes certain dataset accessible via the Open Government Data

iiiPlatform India (https://data.gov.in/).

A smart solution must make open data access as its first priority. However, this remains a big challenge and manifests itself to exponential level with diverse systems at different cities with data locked in proprietary solutions and vendor data centers.

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SOFT CHALLENGES (CAN BE TACKLED WITH PROCEDURAL CHANGES):

ABSENCE OF SMART CITY STANDARDS

It is apparent that data will play key role in smart city implementation. Current big data technologies can handle large & diverse datasets and provide insights. However, there is an immense need to develop standards that can guide technology providers & administrators: Common data communication protocols at device level System communication mechanism via well-defined interfaces Stakeholders communication (internal & external, social media) Data interpretation, conversion and flow between systems Standards to maintain citizen privacy Data security, storage, archival and purging Integrated data visualization framework Compliance and regulatory requirementsSuch standardization demands both top-down and bottom-up approach in collaboration with various stakeholders. Currently, such 'all-encompassing' standards do not exist globally. Standards

ivorganization like IEC has clearly identified this need and is coordinating such efforts.

VENDOR DEPENDENCY

Currently there are multiple vendors working on smart solutions deployment in different cities. 100 Smart Cities' implementation with multiple vendors will result in various dependency issues such as: Every vendor has its own proprietary standards for communication

and data. Large platform-like implementations are typically slow in adapting new industry standards since it involves complex release cycles. Even if government defines certain standards, such implementation cannot comply with it immediately.

Proprietary solution would use its own data center. There is increasing need for environment-friendly co-located data centers for smart cities. Since there is no standardization of data storage, this will result in islands of smart data clouds located worldwide.

Smart city technologies are relatively new and their scaling with large amount of data is unproven yet. Many point solutions for specific services will end up being an expensive proposition for a city. Patchwork of expensive and un-scalable solutions in smart city realization poses a big threat to achieve true value of such efforts.

STAKEHOLDER PARTICIPATION

Citizens are not just consumers of services but also actors and data generators. They should be empowered to contribute to standards definition. The process should inclusive where stakeholders from various section of society contribute along with government such as: private sector, academia, technology providers, NGO and civil society representatives. Such inclusive approach will lead to necessary consensus.

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Data ownership: Government gets complete control of smart city data. It would be stored in

government controlled co-located data centers within India. This will solve concern about

environment-friendly data centers and ease compliance issues.

Open standards: open data standards solve concerns about data storage, security, privacy

and ownership. Open communication standards facilitate interoperable systems, protocols and

interfaces which aid easy flow of information across systems, uniform ways of data conversion

and interpretation, and consistent data visualization.

Integration with Open Government Data (ODG) Platform India ( ): This https://data.gov.in/

platform facilitates APIs on government dataset and also endorses apps created by developers

on such datasets. This open data platform can be naturally extended for smart city data to boost

various interpretations and visualization of such data.

New value chains: Real-time open data from different sources when looked in conjunction

may result in new interpretations, dependencies and insights creating new value chains and

business models.

Leveraging open-source: There are many open source technologies already being leveraged

in smart city data paradigm for data capture, transfer, storage, processing, and analytics. An

open platform is a natural extension of these technologies.

Agile: Open source software development is typically very agile, constantly evolving and

adopting to upcoming standards unlike slow release cycles of vendor software. Moreover,

government gets complete control of when to rollout new system changes.

Make in India: Finally, such open platform development would be guided by India-specific

standards and not constrained by foreign smart city models or frameworks. It will be developed

within India for Indian context – boosting Make in India initiative of Prime Minister Narendra

Modi!

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India Smart City Value Creation in Open WayIt is apparent that there is a need for a horizontal open platform that can address current

challenges. Such service delivery platform will form a technology backbone of every city. It should

be a scalable and secure platform that provides common services, based on open data standards,

and ensures interoperability between services.

This paradigm of open standards, open data,

interoperability between systems, adherence to

regulations and participative approach

naturally leads to open source movement for

India Smart City Platform.

Open Platform and Benefits Scalability: Smart solutions is still a nascent technology market. Its scalability while

handling large data volume is not tested enough yet. Policy makers may not know

requirements of data analytics and insights leading to complex data processing. In such case,

an incremental approach of horizontal scaling and data processing would be better than

upfront investment in expensive proprietary solutions.

Open Government Data

Platform India intends to

increase transparency

in the functioning of

Government and also

open avenues for many

more innovative uses of

Government Data to

give different 7perspective.

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Open-source Smart City Platform India ConsortiumFor developing Open-source Smart City Platform India (OSCPI) based on open standards, we

propose to form a consortium. It should be a joint partnership between Government of India,

academic institutions (IIT, CDAC), technology companies and open-source promoters from

industry, NASSCOM, and civil society representatives and NGOs.

Consortium Agenda iiThis consortium's agenda should revolve around use of ICT in an open way to build smart city

solution. Following would be the key focus areas for consortium:

1. Define technology roadmap for smart city implementation.

2. Define smart city architecture blueprint, data flow blueprint and data standards (storage, security

and privacy).

3. Define platform interface guidelines.

4. Define device protocol guidelines.

5. Define API requirements, structure, and usage of APIs.

6. Define app creation and promotion strategies for both private and public apps.

7. Establish User interface and visualization guidelines.

8. Identify and finalize open source components to be used.

Once such consortium is formed, formal structure will be defined around its deliverables, phases,

checkpoints, timeline.

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We propose a

consortium for

developing open-source

Smart City Platform India

(OSCPI) – partnership

between Government of

India, academic

institutions (IIT, CDAC),

Persistent Systems,

other technology

partners, NASSCOM,

civil society

representatives and

NGO.

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ConclusionSmart city is a vision to be realized over the period of next 10 years. The destination cannot be

reached using traditional way of thinking or turn-key approach. Technology alone will not provide

the solution magically. The success depends on how standards and framework is defined to iileverage ICT in efficient manner, how consensus can be achieved democratically, how India-

specific problems are addressed, and finally, how it is done in most cost- effective and incremental

manner via open source approach.

An open consortium for smart city is a widely used approach. European Union has been funding

such initiatives in EU. Many leading technology providers have identified the need of smart city

open platform and are contributing to same. India-specific consortium for smart cities is a natural

extension of following global trends. It will also serve as huge impetus to 'Make in India' initiative.

References1. India's Urban Awakening: Building inclusive cities, sustaining economic growth –

McKinsey Global Institute, Apr. 2010.

(http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/urbanization/urban_awakening_in_india)

2. Draft Concept Note on Smart City Scheme - Smart Cities

(http://indiansmartcities.in/downloads/CONCEPT%20NOTE-13-10-2014_mkgnew .pdf)

3. http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/in/en/smarter_cities/overview/

4. Navigant Research Leaderboard Report: Smart City Suppliers

(http://www.navigantresearch.com/wp-assets/uploads/2013/07/LB-SCITS-13-Executive-

Summary.pdf)

5. Orchestrating infrastructure for sustainable Smart Cities

(http://www.iec.ch/whitepaper/pdf/iecWP-smartcities-LR-en.pdf)

6. Open data: Unlocking innovation and performance with liquid information, McKinsey

Global Institute, Oct. 2013.

(http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/open_data_unlocking_innovation

_and_performance_with_liquid_information)

7. Open Government Data (OGD) Platform India (https://data.gov.in)

8. Smart City Framework, Cisco

(http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/docs/ps/motm/Smart-City-Framework.pdf)

9. A vision of smarter cities, IBM Institute for Business Value

10. A Nation of Smart Cities, US India Business Council

(http://www.usibc.com/sites/default/files/A%20Nation%20Smart%20Cities.pdf)

i McKinsey Global Institute ii ICT - Information and communication technology

March 2012.iii https://data.gov.in/ is intended to be used by ministries/ departments to publish datasets, documents,

services, tools and applications for public use. It intends to increase the transparency in functioning and

also to open avenues for innovative uses of government data to give different perspective.iv IEC - International Electrotechnical Commission

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DISCLAIMER: “The trademarks or trade names mentioned in this paper are property of their respective owners and are included for reference only and do

not imply a connection or relationship between Persistent Systems and these companies.”

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About Persistent SystemsPersistent Systems (BSE & NSE: PERSISTENT) builds software that drives our customers'

business; enterprises and software product companies with software at the core of their digital

transformation. For more information, please visit: www.persistent.com

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open source consortium for smart cities india

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