Digital India Dialogue to map shift from analogue

Naidu is the key driver of the Smart City concept in the NDA government. He is, however, very pragmatic that it will neither be a top down approach nor another avenue for hand outs. States will have to compete for funds he has said, adding, “Smart cities will not be developed overnight or in Delhi and transported to other centres”.

Speaking about the issues which need to be flagged, Amitabh Kant, secretary, department of industrial policy and promotion (DIPP), notes the economy is on the cusp of urbanisation-based development. “So it is imperative that we focus on innovative and sustainable solutions which will necessarily have to be integrated with the Smart City project”.

Echoing the same line of thought, Onno Ruhl, country director, World Bank said, “What better way to define India’s smart cities than to start with the aspirations of their citizens? Go to any Indian town and ask any girl in class eight what she aspires to be when she grows up. Smart cities in India should aim to enable that aspiration.”

Both Kant and Ruhl will be touching on these strands of thought and more along with NITI Aayog member Bibek Debroy; secretary, department of information technology, Ram Sewak Sharma, along with MD and CEO, ESDS Software Solutions Pvt Ltd, Piyush Somani, as panel members at the event, which is the launch platform of Digital India Dialogue.

The motivation behind the dialogue will be to encourage a frank exchange of thoughts between the political leadership, bureaucracy, chiefs of key academic institutions and corporate leaders on each of the nine components of the government’s pet project — Digital India. The Smart City Dialogue is the first of those as it is also expected to be one of the key deliverables being planned to be rolled out from this year by the NDA government at the Centre.

Debroy and Sharma, in turn, will be expected to speak about the key components of the Smart City project that is impacting numerous sectors of the economy. For instance Debroy, in his capacity as the chairman of the high-level committee for railway restructuring, is working on making the Indian Railways provide the blueprint of a transport network to make such cities take off.

Similarly under Sharma, the department of information technology is sorting through the gargantuan IT possibilities to choose the right menu that will make these cities operate at their maximum capacity through this century and beyond.

Listening in to this power-packed panel will be the who’s who of India’s policy makers, industry leaders and members from the top academic institutions who are each keen to believe that our cities can and ought to be engines of growth, but for that they need re-engineering of governance, of finance and of planning all aided by bringing in the latest available developments in technology and of entrepreneurship.