Smart City Council India to launch Smart City Readiness Guide in September 2015

Smart City Council India will create and launch a Smart City Readiness Guide for India in September 2015. The guide will be a vendor neutral framework for smart cities.

The guide will have 100 case studies in terms of smart practices from various Indian cities across private and government initiatives, according to Pratap Padode, Founder-Director of Smart Cities Council India.

The Council is a consortium of smart city practitioners and experts, with more than 100 members and advisor organisations - including ABB, Alstom, General Electric, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle - in more than 140 countries. It claims to have worked on more than 5,000 smart city projects.

The India guide will be an adaptation of a global version, which has 27 core principles for building smart cities and numerous case studies.

The India version will be created in collaboration with its global partners. Plus, the India chapter of the Council is soliciting partnerships with Indian companies and universities.

Padode said that the Council would not tie up with either the Centre or State governments for smart city developments, albeit individual members of the Council would be free to do so.

Smart cities have been one of the biggest components of the NDA government in terms of giving infrastructure development a big push. The government is expected to name the first 20 (of 100) cities that would be made 'smart' this year itself.

According to Padode, smart cities typically see 20-30 per cent drop in crime, 20 per cent drip in congestion, 20-40 per cent more water, smart buildings 10-30 per cent drop in energy use, and 10-40 per cent reduction in outages.