India's feeble claims to Digital Sovereignty

First Published on April 9, 2009 in Business Standard

http://www.business-standard.com/article/technology/india-s-feeble-claims-to-digital-sovereignty-109040200100_1.html

http://www.rediff.com/money/2009/apr/02indias-feeble-claims-to-digital-sovereignty.htm

As India moves to occupy the space of an IT superpower, the claim to digital sovereignty appears hollow given that it has a feeble presence at the high-stake tables of IT standards. IT standards have become one of the preferred tools of technology giants from developed economies to extract undue economic benefit from emerging economies.

Given that India does not appear to have the political resolve to enhance its presence at the global forums on international IT standards, we seem to be abdicating our responsibility to secure our IT industry as well as IT usage.

The issue becomes even more severe when we observe that globally, nations and firms, are trying to convert technologies on which they have an intellectual property rights (IPR) into standards, thus forcing their monopoly on economies and extracting an unfair and undue economic benefit from manipulation of the global IPR and standards regimes.

The declared aim of standardisation is to enhance productivity and facilitate international trade. The WTO Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) agreement allows for simplification of trade and removes obstacle to trade; reduces need for changing design and manufacture to meet national requirements, reducing complexity and cost; and provides greater choice and understanding for customers.

Compare this to the case where the combination of IPR and standards can give undue economic benefit to large foreign players in developing countries such as India, without the monopoly players adding commensurate value to the economy.

A very good example of the devastating effect of the current IPR regime is the case of the DVD manufacturers in China who have to pay royalty charges on each DVD player manufactured that is to the tune of 33 per cent of the retail price of the DVD player, for a video format standard that is used ($20 royalty on a player of $60). China was helpless in preventing such an unfair cess being put on its domestic industry, demonstrating its lack of digital sovereignty at that point in time.

It is impossible for the majority of the citizens to buy a $400 (around Rs 20,000) PC when the per capita annual income of the citizens is around $500 (around Rs 25,000).

Therefore, if the 7.5 million PCs sold in India last year could avoid paying for the operating system, it could result in huge savings. This is possible as free software exists but the operating environment is heavily loaded against use of such software, which demonstrates India’s lack of digital sovereignty.

Similarly, other consumer goods with embedded software like DVD players, mobile phones etc., can also be made to cost less with the appropriate policy measures that India can take, only if India has digital sovereignty.

It has been observed that organisations file blanket patents on an emerging technology that is out of reach of developing countries. Such multiple patents are put in a manner that prevents late joiners from being able to find any niche of making any new contribution to the area without violating the patents already filed in.

None of the standards bodies such as ISO, IEC, IEEE are mandated to check if the standard adopted is truly royalty free. Thus, the global technology framework is being misused to indulge in anti-trust (monopolistic) practices.

This is where we start losing our digital sovereignty. It is imperative for India to ensure that it is a serious player in formulating digital standards in order to ensure security of its IT industry and to maintain its digital sovereignty.

The Future of Indian Railways 2050

Future of Indian Railways 2050

(As published in Business India, August 2016)

Indian Railways will have to transform so significantly by 2050 that not only will it be recognizable from its current operations but also most of its current assets will get replaced completely.

We need to understand the drivers that will make this transformation an imperative.

As per the UNDP Regional Human Development Report, India’s working population (people in the age group of 15 to 64 years) will be over a billion by 2050, which will be the largest workforce in the world. This workforce will be highly mobile. In addition, it is expected that over 70% of the population will be urban by 2050 and would have a higher mobility requirement. Given the load carrying capacity of various transportation options and their impact on the environment, railways would have to shoulder the bulk of this massive transportation requirements.

The second key trend driving railways is technological transformations. Mass transportation will be completely transformed in the next 30 years with technologies such as high speed rails (bullet trains), hyperloops (currently being tested in California and Russia among other places), Internet of Things, solar energy, large scale electrification of the economy and moving away from dependence on oil based technologies etc, driving this transformation.

In addition, railways will face competition from other modes of transportation such as road transportation, riverine transportation, coastal shipping and air transportation. Each of these transport systems will become much more efficient, faster and autonomic, implying that they will be managed by computers and would not require dedicated operators such as drivers, pilots etc. Hence these transportation systems will also become cheaper and in addition, will be significantly less polluting than what they are now.

 What that would imply for Indian railways is that it would have to start adopting newer systems of mass transportation, that would transport people and goods much more efficiently and at speeds that are an order of magnitude higher. Such systems would require complete overhaul of the railways as we see them today, with even the tracks requiring to be changed and perhaps even getting replaced by other locomotion enablers, as in the case of Hyperloops, which would require tubes rather than rails for locomotion. Clearly, railways too will become autonomous, requiring no train drivers, station masters,  manned crossings etc. Such a transformation would require a completely new signaling system and railways infrastructure, including automated gates at road crossings, systems that talk to the surroundings such as to incoming trains, vehicles at crossings and perhaps even airplanes, so that not only do the trains travel faster and safer, but are also able to coordinate with modes of transportation that passengers would need to use or that cargo would need to use. For example, if bulk of the passengers are going from one city to another, primarily to take a long distance flight, then the train would need to be in touch with the airplane company, to ensure that delays, If any, get factored into the dynamic rescheduling.

Indian railways in 2050, would also be a different ecosystems from the current one that is dominated by a single behemoth. Indian railways in 2050, would be corporate dominated ecosystem, with perhaps the current Railways Board transforming into a corporation. It would have all kinds of business models with private players managing their own coaches in a larger train, to running entire trains and owning the linear assets (such as railways tracks or the tubes for hyperloop), to owning railway stations. It would not be unthinkable to have airline companies expanding into railways to provide seamless travel  experience to passengers and cargo.

In addition, Indian Railways in 2050, will not be limited to the borders of India. It would connect with the economies in the east, it would connect with the economies in Central Asia and would perhaps stretch all the way to Europe, in partnership with railways in other countries.

Indian Railways will also start generating significant revenues from non-ticketing sources such as onboard retailing through digital retail, monetization of non-tangible assets, and leveraging technology. It will have a very diversified portfolio of cargo and will not be limited to bulk cargo such as coal (which anyways will have a very limited role by 2050).

Indian railways in 2050 will clearly be unrecognizably different from today’s railways, to be able to shoulder the responsibilities and challenges of the people workforce and cargo of 2050.

Namami Gange: A Possible Water Panacea for the Northern Region States

Mission rationale and background

The Ganga river basin, for long, has been important for the country, owing to its cultural significance and the economic implications of its coverage as it supports about 43 per cent of the Indian population.[1] However, the river basin today stands heavily polluted due to the discharge of untreated industrial and domestic waste. The underutilisation of urban wastewater and the lack of efficient sewerage networks have only contributed to the problem. For instance, the CPCB estimates that the 144 drains along the main stem of the river discharge more than 6000 million litres per day (MLD) of sewage/sullage with industrial effluents. As per estimates of the MoWR, a sewage treatment capacity of about 7300 MLD is required whereas the currently, it is a mere 3300 MLD (2100 MLD created and 1200 MLD under creation).[2]

The image to the left shows Sisamau Nala, Kanpur’s largest and most-polluted open drain, discharging waste into the Ganga. The image to the right is of a polluted stretch of the Ganga, between Allahabad and Varanasi. Photo sources: www.downtoearth.org.in and www.livemint.com

Even within the existing 2100 MLD of sewage treatment capacity which is only 28% of the requirement, several plants are not utilized fully, are outdated and need to be renovated, modernized and maintained properly.  In the major cities of the north India along the river basin, situation is no different as far as sanitation woes are concerned.  For instance in Delhi, the sewerage network has lacked maintenance leading to overflow of raw sewage in open drains, due to blockage, settlements and inadequate pumping capacities. The sewage treatment capacities in key north Indian cities along the basin is thus far from being efficient both in terms of capacity and maintenance. Moreover, considering the rapid urbanization in these cities in the coming years, the capacity addition plans in progress also might not be sufficient. The following table highlights the sewage treatment capacities in the major cities along the Ganga basin in North India.

City	Sewage Generation (MLD)	Sewage Treatment Capacity (MLD)	Sewage Treatment Capacity (% of total sewage generated)
Haridwar	39.6	18	45%
New Delhi	3800	2330	61%
Kanpur	339	171.1	50%
Allahabad	208	89	43%
Varanasi	187.1	141	75%

Sewage generation and treatment capacities of major cities along the Ganga basin (2013); source: http://cpcb.nic.in/

Thus, the Namami Gange programme, for the revitalisation of the largest river basin of India, holds vital implications for the northern region. It addresses the urgent need for an Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) approach at river-basin level, to promote coordinated management of water resources and equitable access without compromising the sustainability of ecosystems. With sub-areas including sustainable municipal sewage management, managing of sewage from rural areas, industrial discharge and others, the flagship initiative of the Indian government has the potential of going a long way in addressing the water crises in the region.

Mission features and current status

With an outlay of INR 20,000 crores for a period of 5 years (2014-15 to 2019-20)[3], Namami Gange envisions to accomplish the mandate of the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG). Implementation has been divided into entry-level activities (for immediate impact) and medium term activities, to be implemented in the direction of achieving the long-term objectives (refer to the Figure 1 for an overview of the programme).

                                                                                                                              

The funding mechanism has been reinvented, owing to the observation that investments made under past programmes (Ganga Action Plan I & II, NGRBA, Yamuna Action Plan) were far from optimal. The Union Cabinet approved the Hybrid Annuity based Public Private Partnership (PPP) model for the mission with an aim to reform India’s wastewater sector and infuse efficiency, viability and sustainability. Under the model, the government will provide 40 per cent of the project cost during the construction period and the release of funds is linked to the progress of construction. The rest of the investments will have to be raised from private sources in the form of equities and loans. The overall equity burden on private bidders would thus be less and so would the loan requirement in comparison to the other modes of PPP, making banks potentially more comfortable. The loans would be paid back by the government in instalments during the contract period, based on the performance of the private player and the asset. The model envisages the infrastructure and O&M investments, to be shared between the Centre and the States on a 70:30 basis respectively. The state governments have been further instructed to strategise resource recovery through their Urban Local Bodies (ULB’s).[4]

Keeping in view the need for scalability, a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) is to be established to plan, structure and procure, along with monitoring implementation of the PPP projects. The SPV would enter into MoA’s with participating State Governments and respective ULBs for taking up individual projects. Additionally, MoU’s with various ministries, such as the already-underway MoU with Ministry of Railways for purchase of treated water from STPs to facilitate faster market development for treated wastewater, are to be undertaken.[5]

Challenges and need for innovation

The mission along with sanitising the river basin, calls for efficient waste management infrastructure such as bio-digestor toilets, bathing facilities, along with sewerage treatment plants and networks. The mission has crucial economic, social and environmental implications. Thus, its mandates include livelihood generation models, health programmes and community engagement programmes for populations living along the banks.

While momentous, the initiative has its share of challenges to meet. The scale of the waste water being discharged into the basin every day requires a joint approach of river conservation and urban waste management, and likewise, substantial investments and collaborative efforts of the state governments. However, while open to private individual and organisational funding, data from the corporate affairs ministry shows private funding received for Namami Gange in 2014-15 to be the least among the government’s flagship programmes.[6] The selection of the appropriate private partners for the implementation and operation & maintenance of the projects will be a key success factor for the initiative.

The end-to-end implementation of the initiative’s projects needs to be swift and efficient considering the time frame and the progress achieved till date. The following key interventions if brought in during the implementation phase of the projects could lead to improved efficiency and effective implementation:

§  Thorough technical assessments need to be done to identify specific technological interventions required while earmarking the capital costs for each plant

§  Additionally, efficient project management calls for cost and time benchmarks, and a rigorous monitoring framework

§  Assessment of real-time operational parameters of the treatment plant and quality parameters of the treated water through usage of data analytics are imperative for the mission’s success

§  The sewage treatment plants (STP’s) must combine aspects of IT, data analytics, smart energy management, smart water treatment, grey water treatment to collect, treat and suitably redeploy treated water

§  Possibility of integrating STPs with simulation software to predict effluent quality in real time and manage quality risks throughout its lifecycle

§  New STPS should be equipped to handle both storm water along with normal sewage

---

[1] http://nmcg.nic.in/location.aspx

[2] http://cpcb.nic.in/GANGA-SegmentApproach9-12-2015.pdf

[3] http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=121638h

[4] http://nmcg.nic.in/external_funding.aspx

[5] http://www.pmindia.gov.in/en/government_tr_rec/namami-gange/

[6] http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/modis-swachh-bharat-abhiyaan-gets-thumbs-down-from-corporates/1/669075.html

Cognititve Cities

First published in http://www.livemint.com/Politics/wVQXVFXdROHPovCXU4awpK/Would-you-like-to-live-in-a-cognitive-city.html

Would you like to live in a cognitive city?

Imagine a city that senses your needs and provides personalized services without any human intervention

---

Jaijit Bhattacharya

There is an immediate need for smart cities to rapidly evolve into cities that will ‘learn’ from their ecosystem and fast-evolving context to autonomically respond to developing needs. Photo: Hindustan Times

Imagine the clock waking you up in the morning, not at a fixed hour but at a time that factors in the traffic and weather conditions to calculate how long it will take to reach the airport. If the flight is delayed, the airline will inform the clock, based on which the clock may recompute the time to wake you up.
Based on your flight bookings, a driverless car assigned by the city will calculate the time it will take to reach the airport so your clock can re-calculate the time to wake you up, ensuring you get enough time to get ready for your car to pick you up.
As the car drives you to the airport you slip into a Virtual Reality (VR) conference meeting in your in-car VR conference system. The car will also provide you on its screen the details of the appointments and tasks for the day as it is personalized for you.
This is a glimpse of the kind of city we will be living in the near future—a city that senses the needs of each citizen and each city asset, analyses the context by receiving feedback from multiple systems and provides all its citizen personalized services in a proactive manner through autonomic decisions, without human intervention.
This is a cognitive city.
While cities are trying to transform into smart cities, it would be worthwhile for some cities to leapfrog and actually aspire to become a cognitive city, rather than initiate a separate transformation in the future when it will have to dismantle the systems of the smart city in order to create a cognitive city.
The premise of a smart city is a one that is safe, secure, accessible, sustainable, energy efficient and IT-enabled. In the Indian context, it also implies cities that have a robust core urban infrastructure that is IT-enabled so that they can be monitored and be made more efficient. Such cities will give a better quality of life to their citizens.
However, what does a city manager do when inundated with video feeds from 10,000 cameras, sensor signals from a million devices and electronic information that the infrastructure is breaking down? Is it humanly possible to take decisions based on the smart-city infrastructure to take appropriate mitigating actions? How can cities decide on their own, without intervention of city managers?
Thus, there is an immediate need for smart cities to rapidly evolve into cities that will “learn” from their ecosystem and fast-evolving context to autonomically respond to developing needs, taking decisions without the explicit intervention of city managers. This would be a cognitive city. Such cognition will be based on an appropriate set of information at the right time, and will lead to a proactive and personalized city—a city that can detect a visually challenged citizen and automatically get its city surveillance to monitor the person as they walk through the city and which can communicate with the on-body systems of the person in order to guide them and proactively provide for what the person needs. This is what a cognitive city will do.
However, to reach this desired state, a city will require to have the five key pillars of a cognitive city: 1) Pervasive compute and communication fabric; 2) Personalized city; 3) Participative city; 4) Outcome-based city; and 5) Informed city. These pillars would allow the city to make autonomic decisions.
Delving deeper into the pillars, a pervasive compute and communication fabric ensures that everything and everyone is connected electronically and computation is embedded wherever information is being collected and transmitted. Therefore, it’s a city that has sensors embedded in all vehicles, flyovers, bridges, gates, poles etc; has compute embedded in surveillance cameras, sewage treatment plants etc. Such a pervasive compute and communication fabric would allow a city to analyse and contextualize the needs of its citizens on a real-time basis, thus enabling it to be a personalized, outcome-based and participative city that can manage itself autonomically.
This capability is what will allow the city to allocate a time slot for the driverless car to pick up a passenger for the airport, and be able to compute accurately the time required to reach a particular destination factoring in the traffic and the weather conditions, and factoring in the delay in the flight.
It would also enable the tap to communicate with the upstream water-treatment plant and inform it about the quality of water and therefore autonomically change the treatment plant parameters in order to generate acceptable quality of water.
The pervasive compute and communication fabric also allows automatic reporting of disruptions in utility services such as water or electricity, to the concerned city government department, and meter reading of utilities will happen through smart meters. The city should create an environment for information sharing, inter-operability, collaboration and seamless experience for each citizen. This will enable seamless communication between all things and all persons, facilitating the city to take autonomic decisions for providing personalized services.
The second pillar of being a personalized city implies a city with the capability to solve each citizen’s problems in a personalized manner, such as the airline syncing up with the city’s driverless car transportation system and with the citizen’s clock to orchestrate a series of actions which begin with the alarm clock deciding when to wake up the citizen so that they have enough time to get ready, catch the driverless car and reach the airport to catch the delayed flight—and all in the most efficient manner, minimizing resource consumption of the city. It would also include proactively provide services to citizens, such as enrolling a child in school as soon as the child becomes eligible to go to school, rather than making the parents run around applying to various schools. And of course, all schools will be equal, as education will be provided through the same set of technological and cognitive systems.
The third pillar, participative city, allows the citizens to participate effectively in its administration and policymaking. All citizens are heard and the city morphs as per the demands of the citizens, rather than being a fossilized city which is driven by the whims and fancies of a few appointed individuals. This would also ensure that the city stays relevant for its people and that it does not lose its vibrancy.
The fourth pillar is that of an outcome-based city. A city that is focused on outcomes—and not outputs—is an outcome-based city. Should the city focus on buying air conditioners for its offices or should it focus on ensuring 24-degree centigrade temperature for its offices? If it focuses on the former, it would do traditional purchasing and might end up with a sub-optimal solution of having an electricity guzzling air conditioner that requires heavy maintenance. If it focuses on the latter, then it might spend on upgrading the insulation of the walls and the windows and installing a district cooling system that is far more efficient and dramatically reduces energy consumption. This would be an outcome-based city.
Similarly, an outcome-based city will focus on ensuring people reach their offices and therefore plan to keep offices close to homes, and provide pedestrian and non-motorized transportation connections as well as appropriate public transportation, rather than ensuring that cars can travel smoothly from homes to distant offices.
The fifth and last pillar for a cognitive city is an informed city. For a city to take autonomic decisions supported by cognitive technologies, it will require accurate and real-time information about the status of urban infrastructure and urban services provided to each citizen, in order to understand and analyse the requirements of each citizen in terms of health, safety, education, infrastructure-based services such as safe drinking water, reliable electricity and sustainable, safe and reliable transportation and communication.
The information-centric city should ideally have three interconnected areas of focus—technology, human, institutional. It should know the time of your first meeting of the day so that it can get the city to ensure that you attend it on time; it should know when your daughter is ready to enrol in a school and automatically register her in the most appropriate school; it should know that air pollution levels are going up and start shutting down pollution-generating machines; it should detect which citizen needs psychiatric help and proactively provide that; who is having a heart attack as the embedded pacemaker sends out the information to the smart watch that connects to the city’s real-time medical system that autonomically instructs the patient to rush to the nearest hospital and also order a driverless ambulance to take the patient to the nearest hospital while sending the patient’s records to the available cardiac specialist and instructing the specialist to also rush to the hospital to attend to the incoming patient.
The city will also be able to find out if a flyover is going to fall, using information from strain gauges embedded in the flyovers, find that the water getting into a specific home is unfit for consumption as the pipe has developed a leak and rain water has mixed with the potable water, or tell people to avoid going to a particular part of the city because of rising air pollution, hence reduce the air pollution in the targeted locality. An informed city is a key pillar of the cognitive city.
Finally to enable these fundamentals of a cognitive city, the role of the government, the relationship between government agencies, non-government agencies and the citizens and their governance mechanisms are fundamental to the design and implementation of these initiatives and are considered institutional factors of an information-centric city.
A cognitive city will allow every citizen and business to receive services proactively from the city without needing to log in and request the service, have access to world-class education sitting at home, have their health monitored on a continuous basis, have their health problems detected prior to the occurrence, allow automatic reporting and remedial of household issues related to water, electricity, gas and waste through smart meters. Sensors in cars will detect and report potholes on the road which will trigger the road-bots to step in and fix the potholes. The possibilities are limitless.
But a city needs to be ‘architected’ to be a cognitive city. It would be interesting to note which city becomes the first Cognitive City.

The author is partner, government and infrastructure, at KPMG Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd.

Jaijit Bhattacharya

Topics: smart citytowninfrastructurepersonalized serviceurbanization

 

The Great Indian Minority: The MIddleclass

The Great Indian Middle Class: India’s New Political Constituency

The relationship and the divide between the majority and minority communities often drive the dynamics of electoral politics in most countries. In India the force exerted by majority and minority communities is particularly potent because of the multiple definitions of majority and minority owing to the existence of numerous caste, class, and religions in the country. The electoral politics in India is deeply entrenched in the politicization of these groups, especially the minority groups.

However, what emerges from a closer look at the Indian society is that there is no majority group. The Indian society is nothing but an amalgamation of the several minority groups. Even the majority population is split into sub-communities such as Bengalis (7.5% of Indian population), Marathi speakers (7% of Indian population), Oriyas (4% of Indian population), Gujaratis (4.5% of Indian population), and Tamils (6% of Indian population). Despite the strong community identities not all these minority groups have aligned and uniform voting preferences.

Traditionally the Muslim (13.4% of Indian population), and the Dalit (16.6% of Indian population) are the most influential minority groups in India due to their uniform voting preferences, often choosing to vote en-masse for a party. Any party that manages to get the votes of these two groups can have nearly one-third of Indian electorate in its pocket.

However, the emergence of a new group in recent years can potentially shift the entire landscape of Indian electoral politics. This group is the Indian middle class.

Different estimates put the Indian middle class between 250-350 million, which not only makes it 20-30 per cent of the Indian population, but also nearly as big as the population of the USA.  It is the class that constitutes the mainstream of the Indian demographic, and is a force to reckon with, which has been repeatedly acknowledged by the government, the corporate world, and the academia.  

Just as the majority groups and communities of the India, the great Indian middle class is often viewed as a uniform entity. The reality, however, is that it is a diverse and fractionalized group constituting of different religions, castes, and classes coming from distinct parts of the country.

The making of the Indian middle class has been an economic, rather than a social or a political process. At the same time it is the attitude rather than income that defines the Indian middle class. In spite of being composed of the minorities that have distinct and diverse social and political interests, what makes the middle class a uniform force are its aspirations, and tied economic interests. The key characteristics of the Indian middle class can said to be its distinct middle class values, concern with the welfare of the family, focus on being upwardly mobile, adherence to rules and regulations, a tolerant and less discriminating outlook, its reluctance to revolt yet confidence to be vocal about resentments, its sharp views on current affairs, and its cynicism. It’s these shared behavioural and aspirational attitudes that make the middle class a constituency in its own right - a constituency that is not only the largest, but also the fastest growing in India.

The political cynicism of the middle class is often taken to imply that the class plays a passive role in Indian electoral politics. However, the Indian middle class is not as dormant as it is perceived to be. In the last ten years this class has come into its own by more clearly defining its economic aspirations and social priorities. The growing social angst increasingly witnessed in urban areas, and demand for policies that ensure faster economic growth are testimony to its maturity, and emerging influence. The expansion of this class in the coming years will result in more equitable distribution of wealth while the insatiable appetite of this class for education, services, and consumer goods will fuel the economic growth of the country.

Until now the middle class has not been given political attention that is proportional to its size because of prevalent notions about its political cynicism, and low voter turnouts. A significant reason for the cynicism of the middle class is that no political party in India has yet considered it to be a political constituency in its own right, or engaged with it from a view of mobilizing it as a political force.  However, the time has come for the government to focus on this class.

This is the right time for political parties to start addressing the concerns and needs of the Indian middle class not only because it emerging as India’s largest constituency, but also because it is a fallacy to presume that this class cannot influence the turnout of an election. It has done so, and can continue to so, by not voting in the elections. As it can by beginning to vote.

What is needed is a dedicated strategy to get insights into the middle class, and its concerns. Attention to this class will help it to emerge out of its cynicism and become a more active player in the Indian electoral politics. Now, it’s merely a question of which political party decides to leverage on the potential of the great Indian middle class.

Smart Parking for Smart Cities

Published in https://issuu.com/urbanaworld/docs/urbana_jan_feb_2016_final.compresse

The ‘100 Smart Cities Mission’ of the Government of India identifies smart parking as one of the core infrastructure elements for a Smart City[1]. The increasing pace of motorization within Indian Cities in the last decade has led to an urgent need to address both on-street and off-street parking. A recent global study of parking in big cities across the world suggests that the average city driver spends an average of 18 to 20 minutes searching for parking[2], resulting in driver stress, wastage of fuel, increased emissions, congestion on city streets and decrease in productivity. The study by IBM points out that “drivers in Nairobi averaged 31.7 minutes in their longest search for a parking spot, and commuters in Bangalore, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Mexico City, Paris and Shenzhen all reported means significantly above the worldwide average. Seventeen percent of drivers in Milan and Beijing and 16 percent of drivers in Madrid and Shenzhen spent 31 to 40 minutes looking for parking”.

Parking problems are turning out to be ubiquitous and growing at an alarming rate in every major city in India, causing challenges for city administrations and traffic authorities and lack of technology in parking ecosystem keeps on elevating this problem on a daily basis. Absence of real-time parking information for drivers has emerged as key problem for approximately 30 million Indian commuters across major cities. As per a study done by Frost & Sullivan (2015), a commuter in Delhi spends an extra 80+ hours driving more than 150 miles more every year looking for parking spaces. This in turn has a cascading effect such as wasting more than a million gallons of fuel during peak hours, burning more CO2, spending around 250 hours more in traffic congestion every year.

Increasingly, Cities across the world are effectively adopting innovative strategies that promote ‘value for money’ by ‘doing more with less’ and addressing parking challenges by leveraging technological advancements. The Frost & Sullivan Study[3] suggests that ‘smart parking’ is going to be increasingly associated with various modes of travel and “involve multiple stakeholders from the automotive, telecommunication and infrastructure industries" 

Cities are providing information related to real-time status of every parking spot, helping drivers find a free one, pay directly from their phone and all of these through mobile apps. Given the increasingly high usage of mobile applications in India, smart parking solutions based on mobile app can emerge as a key solution for Indian Smart Cities as part of their larger goal to improve urban mobility and explore dependable revenue generation models.

·       Concept of sensor-based parking management

The sensor-based smart parking initiative employs a simple concept where individual sensors are placed in between the parking slot. Whenever a car gets parked in the parking slot (both on-street & off-street), it is detected by the sensor. The information from the sensors are relayed to wi-fi receivers, which in turn stores it in the server regarding the current place occupied by the car. This is same in the case when the car leaves the parking space.

The information relayed from each sensor is sent to a mobile phone app, which provides drivers with a real-time map of free spaces. The mobile app also allows a driver to reserve a parking spot in a convenient parking lot, based on their preferences, traffic conditions and availability of public transport. Subsequently based on the parking tariff, the payment of parking fees is facilitated through the mobile app, thereby reducing the need for cash payments.

As a result, this significantly cuts down the amount of time spent searching for parking spaces and, crucially, reduces environmental impacts resulting from congestion and emissions in urban areas.

The introduction of sensor-based smart parking systems has potential win-win scenarios for all stakeholders in the urban parking ecosystem within Indian Cities:

Citizens: The sensor-controlled parking management system provides citizens with statistical and real-time data to effortlessly locate the current parking space availability or availability at a certain time of day. The driver gets detailed information about occupied and free spaces available in the parking area through a mobile application and thereafter is able to book the desired parking slot by making a payment using the mobile app. The parking rates and standard policies for each location can be accessed by the driver through the mobile app.

City Administration: The principal benefit of a sensor-based smart parking initiative for city administration is provision of better parking management and its impact on traffic management and public transport management as a result of improved traffic flow, less congestion, and better mobility.  The City administration is expected to play the role of an enabler of infrastructure such as sensors and Wi-Fi equipment and also act as the key entity for deciding the governance and implementation of the infrastructure required for the sensor-based smart parking framework within its area. The privacy and confidentiality of public information and its usage is also regulated by city administration. The initiative empowers city administrators to track payment and overstay violations, get instant information on parking occupancy, revenue generation and provide optimum parking capacity at a lower investment than the other solutions presently available.

Service Providers: They are responsible for developing the software and technology architecture for provision of parking spaces. Service providers are also able to generate detailed descriptive reports and also forecast informative insights that aid in the development of future parking management strategies for city administrators.  Reliable application programming interfaces (APIs) need to be in place so as to offer services to consumers through a variety of mediums (web/ mobile phone apps).

·       Key Outcomes of a sensor-based smart parking management

The fundamental objective behind sensor-based smart parking is about augmenting service levels for citizens, thereby improving the urban environment, optimizing parking space usage, enhanced revenues through dynamic pricing and promotion of intermodal travel for citizens.

In conclusion :

Smart Parking is one key tool in mitigating the transportation issue by optimizing usage of the parking assets in a city. In the process, it makes the city more efficient and less polluting, as it reduces unnecessary movement of vehicles which are searching for parking and also reduces random parking that leads to roads being blocked which in turn reduces the average speed of vehicles. Any modern city that is desirous of transforming into a smart city, must adopt Smart Parking, as part of its overall transportation solution.

---

[1] 2014 Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India, Smart City – Mission Statement & Guidelines

[2] 2011 IBM, Global Parking Survey of 20 Cities                                                                                                      

[3] 2015 Frost & Sullivan, Strategic Analysis of Smart Parking Market in Europe and North America