Platform for Smart Cities to share data on anvil, could be monetised

The white paper about the project proposes the example of fire, traffic and hospitals sharing data for emergency responses. In another example, it states that streetlight timers can be connected with traffic density patterns to optimise power consumption.

Other data sets named in the paper include air quality, property records, legal registrations and more. The project will begin in Electronics City, Bengaluru, before scaling up nationally.

The MoHUA official used the example of mobile phone location as a potential data set that could illuminate public movement patterns for public infrastructure management or law enforcement.

The white paper also proposes a non-profit, start up company called the Open Smart Cities of India (OSCI) with central and state government officials, Smart City officials, researchers, and industry players to set up and scale IUDX.

The Smart City Mission will also launch a ‘Data Smart Cities Policy’ which will allow cities to open their data to public view, such as number of hospitals, gardens, people, public toilets and other city management, the official added. It will be a separate portal for Smart Cities under the data.gov website.

The white paper also stated that smart cities are currently “largely independent, created in vertical silos, with no standardization of software components or of their interfaces, or of the underlying data models. Data created by a specific application is usually available only to that application and cannot be leveraged more broadly.”