Smart Cities Track at IoT India Congress 2019

Last week I chaired the Smart Cities Track at the IoT India Congress. I must say it was not easy to draw parallels between different verticals and stakeholders involved in the Smart Cities space - it being such a macro domain. Having said that, we had a fantastic deep dive on use-cases - smart parking, smart cities implementation followed by a panel discussion focussing on 3 areas of Smart cities: energy management, water management and safety & security.

We are yet to see a real implementation of a Smart city at scale but was enlightened and inspired to hear about Naya Raipur and other such initiatives. Interestingly, ‘Smart poles’ / ‘Smart lighting poles’ solutions are fantastic gateways to other solutions that could be built in it - wifi hotspots and what not. And there are many successful IoT implementations with Smart lighting across major cities including Bengaluru.

In the panel discussion, we also had a chance to discuss about implementation issues including ownership of assets / data, infrastructure challenges, governance.

Last but not the least, we spoke about how equitable and not equal distribution of resources should be a mandate when it comes to Smart cities. In order for that to happen, it is important to understand the diversity of the population and leverage IoT and data to ensure optimum allocation of resources. This is a herculean task but not impossible.

Finally, our track ended with a beautiful presentation on how humans respond to technology and what a university is doing to familiarise users to the idea of a ‘blockchain’ and other such technologies.

I would like to thank all the panelists and speakers who made it for the event. It was indeed a pleasure to learn from each other.