Dhamodaran Ramakrishnan, Director, Smarter Planet Solutions – IBM India & South Asia talks about the company’s approach towards the booming smart cities segment in India. By Pupul Dutta.
In India, we do not yet have smart grids; smart cities seem like a distant dream, your take on that.
India is undergoing a massive urban transformation. Every minute during the next 20 years, 30 Indians will leave rural India for urban areas. At this rate, India will need some 500 new cities in the next two decades. By 2050, it is estimated that urban population will constitute nearly half of the total population in India. The smarter our cities become – the better for humanity.
IBM offers solutions for the optimisation of the entire energy value chain – power generation, transmission, distribution and renewables; and we are actively engaged with forward looking utilities in all these segments of the industry. We are currently engaged in more than 150 smart grid projects around the world and are committed to helping utilities realize the full investment of their smart grid programs. Policy makers worldwide, including India, are accelerating the transformation of electricity networks and pilot implementations in India are already on the immediate horizon.
What is IBM doing in the smart city projects?
Working with forward-looking city leaders on over 2,500 successful city projects across the world, IBM is committed to transform our cities smarter. For instance: smart metering in Malta helps citizens pay only for the energy they use. Predictive analytics helped slash Richmond’s crime rate by 40% in one year. These are all real stories, driven by predictive insights harnessing discreet flow of information, anticipating problems, coordinating resources like a cognitive system of a living organism.
IBM India is prepared and committed to bring the best of our smarter cities solutions to make Indian cities more efficient. To date, we have led over 2,500 projects with cities globally. We can now monitor, measure and manage nearly any physical system at work in our cities. We have the ability to collect and analyse real-time information on everything from transportation networks, to hospitals, to the electricity grid. IBM is seeing good traction in the areas like traffic management, water management, crisis and disaster management. IBM India is also running pilots in some cities where it is trying to ease traffic congestion. Globally we use GPS systems in cities like Stockholm and Singapore to track traffic congestion. In India, we are trying to track a traffic jam by collocating mobile phone density. We will implement it elsewhere in the world if it is successful here.
What according to you are the challenges faced by the cities today and what can be done to change the scenario, especially in India?
Facing aging infrastructures, declining budgets, changing demographics and increasing threats, forward-thinking city leaders must innovate to address citizen demands. They must reach to collaborate and integrate with a range of organisations, facilitating new interconnections that improve outcomes. Leaders need new ways to sustain high service levels for citizens and businesses while improving efficiencies. They need to drive economic growth and enhance quality of life while facilitating coordinated responses to crises, improving transportation and water management systems, ensuring reliable energy delivery, protecting residents from crime, and reducing the environmental impact of cities through resource conservation and energy efficient urban planning. At the same time, leaders must promote citizen health, deliver optimal outcomes across social programs and educate citizens for tomorrow’s challenges. To accomplish these goals, leaders cannot simply work harder. They must work smarter. IBM smarter cities solutions can help leaders leverage a wealth of information to make better decisions, anticipate problems to resolve them proactively and coordinate resources and processes to operate effectively.
What is the role of collaboration in driving the smarter cities transformation?
We believe in adopting a holistic, collaborative, proactive, engagement-driven approach in evolving smarter cities and enabling citizen-centric services through the use of sophisticated technologies. Indeed, collaboration amongst the public sector, private sector, government, academia, research, NGO and citizen forums plays a key role in achieving this. To sail smart towards a brighter future, cites need to cultivate a thriving academic and innovative culture, a critical mass of industry-specific skills and learning, vibrant cultural institutions and communities and fluid conduits through which knowledge flows across all these communities. This in turn will lead to evolving cities that possess the right mix of diverse talent have a powerful source of competitive advantage as they are often difficult to replicate.
What kind of growth opportunities do you foresee in India?
India’s growing economy is placing huge demands on critical infrastructure – power, roads, railways, ports, transportation systems, healthcare, water supply and sanitation. Some estimates indicate that while the government has raised its investments in infrastructure, the investment gap remains daunting with an estimated $1 trillion required to meet the country’s resource needs over the next five years. And, some of the key areas of investment will be in smart grid, water management, transportation, emergency services and city operations. This significant investment in urban infrastructure also represents an opportunity to consider how these systems interact with each other
and design them in a smarter, more efficient manner.