What makes a city smart? Well, a smart city should have an intelligent traffic management, better lighting, access to quality healthcare, a hygienic waste management system, measures for physical and cybersafety, high benchmark for environmental concern, supply of clean drinking water and space to park cars and bikes of citizens.
Adoption of smart solutions has gained large traction in the smart city initiative across India. With a large volume of sensor-based infrastructure, citizen-centric solutions and big data analytics solutions being taken up in most smart cities, the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem provides the right platform to manage and monitor modern urban landscape, said a KPMG study released here on Wednesday.
Elias George, chairman — infrastructure, government and healthcare, KPMG in India said, the induction of IoTinto the urban setting would ensure optimal management and utilisation of public resources, in addition to making city services like urban transit more customer-centric.
“The expected widespread adoption of IoT will prove to be a seminal factor in improving the efficacy of urban infrastructure, as well as in improving the quality of services to the citizen, thereby making a city truly smart and liveable,’’ said George.
The study stated that, as governments world over focus on economic development, a key component to their strategy entails inclusion of smart technologies into urban planning. No doubt, technology will drive creation of smart cities. IoT— that has a potential economic value of $4 to $11 trillion annually by 2025 — will be fundamental to most smart city projects. India alone has a mandate to create IoT industry worth $15 billion by 2020.
As per KPMG study, world over there will be over 75 billion connected devices by 2025. That means, IoT will create a huge ecosystem comprising faster computing, advanced analytics and improved connectivity, all basic prerequisites to build smart cities.