DataSmart CitiesSmart Cities are complex ecosystem and deal with large number of issues like mobility, management of water, waste water and solid waste, safety and security services, energy, housing, education and health amongst many others. Functions of city governments are organized into multiple layers of administration, departments, agencies and are each responsible for management of some core functions integral to the working of the city. The importance of using data to resolve critical problems faced by cities cannot be exaggerated. In fact, smart cities are all about getting the right data to the right people at the right time to solve complex urban issues.
With deployment of IoT devices, sensors and other methods to ‘sense’ the city, the sources of real-time data are increasing every day. Also, with ever-evolving technologies, data collection, aggregation and processing are becoming easier and affordable in real time with each passing day. The city government/ non-government organizations/ individuals are custodians of different types of data sets/feeds. Since these stakeholders work as vertically integrated structures, a lot of the data so produced remains in silos within them. In order to solve the myriad complex issues faced by cities, it is vital that data locked in such silos be unlocked and shared amongst these entities.
Smart Cities Mission-Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs intends to launch ‘DataSmart Cities’-Strategy to leverage the potential of data to address complex urban challenges in Smart Cities. DataSmart Cities initiative would focus on evolution of culture of data driven governance in Smart Cities.
DataSmart Cities initiative would encourage cities to setup building blocks of Data Culture at the City level such as setting up Smart City Data Alliance, Smart Cities Data Network, and City Data Strategy etc. It also intends to enable peer to peer learning across cities over the data driven governance and outline reusable use cases for Smart cities in different domains.
Your feedback and suggestions over draft consultation paper would be invaluable for us as we try to put this document together for the use of cities. We request you to provide your comments/ suggestions/ recommendations on this consultation paper, here by 15th Jan, 2019.