Mint DIS 2023 | Making cities smarter with smart technologies: Suresh Kumar KK

The smart city mission that aims to improve infrastructure while reducing costs, in order to enhance the quality of life, is well underway in India and progressing steadily, even though there’s still a long way to go, according to Suresh Kumar K.K, Head, India Urban Data Exchange & Data Spaces.

Kumar was speaking at the ‘Mint Digital Innovation Summit 2023’, held in Bangalore on 9 June, shedding light on what's next for smart cities in the country.

With the launch of the National Smart Cities Mission in 2015, India aims to build at least one hundred smart cities across the country. According to Kumar, “While the launch of the mission saw much excitement among people, after nearly a decade the question arises, whether the smart city mission has really made a difference to the city’s ability to manage waste, control traffic, check pollution and more.”

Clearing the doubt, Kumar pointed out “back in 2015, when I started developing applications for smart cities, we did not have any data in public domain to do simulation of transport, traffic, parking, water or electricity”. According to him, “data did exist but was in silos and we had to pull out data from Singapore and London.”

Today, the situation has drastically changed, said Kumar. “We are in a sweet spot to make the best use of the data we have today and we don't have to rely on other countries,” he said, adding that the AI/ML technologies have also matured.

With the increasing population in urban areas, and lack of space in the cities, Kumar said, “A vertical city approach can help to solve some of the issues we are currently facing with an increasing population and the trend of urbanization”. He believes that that’s the way the future cities will be built.

Besides, he emphasized on “Green Corridor, a solution developed for minimizing the response time of emergency vehicles, such as ambulance”. Similar technologies can be used to monitor, flood prediction solid waste prediction, and more, making cities smarter. Likewise he said, “If the 5G is available in the ambulance, doctors can monitor the patient’s situation remotely the work gets done much faster and efficiently”.

“We are fully open source community, and our solution can be replicated anywhere in the world,” he said.