CITY CITY BANG BANG

Jun 22 2014 : The Economic Times (Kolkata)

CITY CITY BANG BANG

TV Mahalingam





Narendra Modi’s dream project, the GIFT megalopolis in Gujarat, offers vital clues to the NDA government’s vision for 100 smart cities

Eighteen kilometers off Ahmedabad airport, two tall buildings rise out of literally nowhere. The twin towers with cobalt blue glass façades are anomalies in the otherwise brown, dusty landscape. At 122 metres and 28 floors high, the towers are the tallest in Gujarat. But height isn't really their claim to fame. The towers are the first buildings to go up in Narendra Modi's dream project: the Gujarat International Financial Tec (GIFT) City. GIFT City, in all likelihood, will be India's first `smart city' to be built from scratch. At GIFT City, the action is happening on the ground and under it. An army of workers is sweating in the sweltering sun, pounding roads and erecting buildings for a school, a fire station and a cooling plant. Workmen are also burrowing underground, digging what will eventually be a 12-km long maze of utility tunnels, through which everything from power cables to fibre optic cables to water pipelines will be routed. When GIFT City's cooling towers will become operational, buildings won't use air-conditioning but district cooling technology, a far more energy-efficient process that circulates chilled water through buildings to cool them. Solid waste will be sucked out from homes and offices at 90 km/hr using pipelines leading directly to a waste processing plant. When fully functional, GIFT City will have a command centre with information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure spread across the city which will manage everyday chores like traffic movement. The closest most Indians have been to experiencing anything like this is inside a cinema hall, for the price of the latest Hollywood sci-fi flick. But, that may change. A Hundred Cities In its election manifesto, the BJP had promised to build 100 hi-tech cities. The NDA government seems to be keen to fulfil that promise. “You cannot build cities overnight. It takes 20-30 years to build a new city. Instead of just making new cities, our idea is to make our exist ing cities smart,“ Union minister for housing and urban development Ven kaiah Naidu told ET a cou ple of days ago. “There will be a mix. One, to con vert an old city into a smart one. Two, to build new cities wherever possible,“ said Naidu. For instance, seven new smart cities are being developed from scratch along the proposed Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC). “We expect the first phase [40-50 sq km] of three smart cities -Dholera [Gujarat], Shendra-Bidkin [Maharashtra] and Global City [Haryana] -to be delivered by 2019,“ says Amitabh Kant, secretary, department of industrial policy and promotion (DIPP). Kant, a former CEO and managing director of DMIC (he's still a director on the board), expects these cities to be home to 2-2.5 million people by 2040. India is not the only country building such cities (see What's Happening Beyond India, pg 11). Brand new smart cities are mushrooming in China, the UAE and South Korea. Meanwhile, cities like Barcelona in Spain and Montpellier in France are implementing smart city solutions to deliver better services to their citizens. In fact, over the next 20 years, over $41 trillion is expected to be spent on smart city projects. Given this, it is not surprising that everybody from the computing giants like Cisco, IBM, Oracle to surveillance solutions vendors are licking their chops in anticipation. “About 10% of the overall cost to build a smart city [or upgrade a current city] will be the cost for implementing surveillance solutions,“ says Sudhindra Holla, country manager, Axis Communications India, the Indian arm of the Swedish manufacturer of network cameras. What's Makes it Smarter So, what is a `smart city' all about? “Smart cities are not about just e-governance. A smart city is one that uses technology to transform its core systems to optimize the best use of its finite resources,“ says Rahul Sharma, executive director and partner, global business service, IBM In dia. Currently IBM is working on 2,500 smart city projects globally. At the heart of the smart city is a vast and all-pervasive ICT network that serves three broad purposes: improving a city's economic efficiency; promoting a better quality of life for citizens; and thereby promoting a sustainable urban environment. Like Kant puts it: “In the new smart cities like Dholera [in the DMIC], we have planned for ICT as another layer of infrastructure along with roads, sewage. It is embedded right in the planning stage of the project.“ So, how different are the new smart cities likely to be from other cities? For one, most of them are not expected to be large urban sprawls like the existing metro cities. Take GIFT City, for instance. “GIFT City has two main features: a smart city and a global financial hub,“ says Ramakant Jha, managing director, GIFT City. “We see nearly 30,000-40,000 people working out of GIFT City by the end of next year. In 10 years, GIFT City will create 5 lakh direct jobs and anoth er 5 lakh indirect jobs,“ says Jha, ple will be living in GIFT City by adding that 60,000-80,000 peo 2024. But then, is GIFT City re ally a city? Or is it just a well-planned central business district (CBD) with fancy technology? After all, when it is fully built up, GIFT City will be about 900 acres in size -less than a tenth in size of Dubai's International Airport (8,500 acres). But then, consider this: the two most talked about smart cities in the world, Songdo (South Korea) and Masdar (UAE), are just about 1,500 acres each in size -larger than GIFT but much smaller than Dubai's airport. Reluctant Urbanizer “GIFT City's planners have moved away from the notion that Indian planners traditionally suffered from...to build long, sprawling green cities which frankly isn't going to work,“ argues Angshik Chowdhury, director, operations, of Smart+Connected Communities at Cisco India. “Increasingly, most economic activities are going to happen in cities that are compact, where there is primary emphasis on transport and job creation...GIFT is not a very, long sprawling city and the ability to manage the city is built in,“ a d d s C h o w d h u r y. C i s c o ' s Smart+Connected portfolio includes remote access to city infrastructure management solutions for connected parking, traffic, safety and security. On the other hand Dholera, which is planned as a manufacturing hub, is spread across 900 sq km -twice the size of Ahmedabad. Does India really need such cities? If there is one thing everybody agrees on, it is that India is urbanizing and really fast. A 2010 McKinsey report throws up numbers that are any urban planner's worst nightmare. By 2030, 590 million Indians will live in cities, up from 340 million in 2008. It took almost 40 years (19712008) for India's urban population to grow by 230 million. The next 250 million city dwellers will be added in half that time. The report suggested that India build nearly 25 satellite cities near large tier I and tier II cities, each accommodating up to a million people. “India has been a reluctant urbanizer... but urbanization is inevitable,“ says Kant. “When America was urbanizing, both land and gas prices were cheap. As a result, the cities were built as large urban sprawls,“ adds Kant, pointing out that Indian cities don't have that luxury. “The use of ICT is an opportunity for Indian cities to leapfrog to the level of cities in developed countries,“ says Kant. From Scratch or Not? What is likely to be the Indian government's approach? Given that building cities from scratch is time and capital consuming, retrofitting smart technology in existing cities may be the way forward. “It is easier to do it in a greenfield project as you start with a clean slate. Also, in a greenfield project, you can offer all services together,“ says Aamer Azeemi, managing director, Cisco Consulting Services, India who has spearheaded the American networking giant's ICT master planning efforts for Dholera. However, brownfield projects (building on sites that have been developed before) are more expensive and tend to be painful to implement. “Just imagine the hassle of laying fibre in any part of Mumbai city,“ says an industry executive. Kant says that the cost of ICT in the proposed DMIC greenfield cities is just 3-4% of total project cost. However, retrofitting cities with smart technologies can cost 1-2% more. “In brownfield projects, cities first tend to offer services that have a revenue potential. How do I make parking smart so that it generates revenue to sustain other activities,“ asks Cisco's Azeemi. “In greenfield projects, city managers tend to leverage the greatest asset they have the right of way for the information highways they have built. A lot of cit ies invest in putting fibre on the ground and lease that out as it is used to offer common services,“ he adds. Building cities -smart or otherwise -from scratch is easier said than done. “The most important part of building a city is to focus on its economic centre,“ says Ajit Gulabchand, chairman, HCC, whose construction company is developing a `hill city' called Lavasa in Maharashtra. “A good starting point is to ask: what is the anchor identity of the city? What is the soul of the city?“ says Vinayak Chatterjee, chairman, Feedback Infra, a consulting firm. “Is it a refinery city or a university city? That answer will tell you where the city must be located and its master-planning contours.“ For instance, refinery cities have to be based near ports, and a university town could be based in the hills, he adds. That will also determine how large or small a city is spread. That explains why Dholera, which is focused on manufacturing, will be almost 250 times larger than GIFT City, which is focused on financial services. Then comes, what Chatterjee calls, `the anchor magnet' of the city. For instance, in Jamshedpur's case it was the Tata Steel factory. New or Renew “I will be glad if we have the economic plans and financial models tied up for five new smart cities in the next five years. That would be a considerable achievement,“ says Chatterjee. “My suggestion would be that the government, in addition to developing these five cities, pick five towns from each region in India and improve basic and core infrastructure, governance in these towns. These could become a model for rejuvenation of existing towns,“ adds Chatterjee. It's a point of view others see merit in. “The greater wave of urbanization is happening in tier II and tier III Indian cities,“ says Ayona Datta, senior lecturer in Citizenship and Belonging, University of Leeds. “The government would serve people better by focusing its resources -by building schools, colleges and hospitals in these cities rather than creating large, expensive cities from scratch that serve the interests of very few people.“ Another industry watcher ET Magazine spoke to put it more bluntly, “Today, we have over 4,000 towns that are badly in need of urban renewal. Do we really want to put financial resources and bureaucratic bandwidth behind creating brand new cities? The choice is this: do you want to have another baby or adopt an orphan?“ Beyond the Hype Globally, greenfield smart cities are still experiments in progress. Their financial models are untested and breakevens a long time away. There has been considerable debate on whether smart cities are a passing fad. In a debate in The Economist last year, Anthony Townsend, a researcher who specializes in new technology in cities, had this to say about smart cities: “...in their rush to leap into a well-planned digital future, the designers of these prototypes have ignored historical experience, how people shape cities, and the messy and organic nature of urban development. Sterile utopian enclaves, they have failed not only as real estate developments but also as incubators of future urban lifestyles.“ Simply put, researchers are asking if smart cities put technology as the prime catalyst of change and not people. “My fundamental problem with the smart city model is the assumption that a city can be built with technology and...technology alone. Cities are built and shaped by people,“ says Datta. Land acquisition is another problem that new cities are likely to face. In Dholera, farmers from 22 villages have already formed groups to protest the acquisition of fertile farm land for industrialization, says activist Sagar Rabari of Jameen Adhikar Andolan Gujarat. More importantly, even if India builds new cities, can it manage them effectively? For that, India may have to get some structural fixes in place. “India has two tiers of governance -central and state -which work in parallel. There is no concept of city level governance in India. City mayors are not powerful in India unlike the rest of the world. Indian cities don't decide their own destiny. That needs to change,“ says Gulabchand. A hundred smart cities may sound like a woolgatherer's wishlist, but the good news is the intent behind that vision -and the government's realization that India badly needs to overhaul its urban infrastructure. As one analyst who did not want to be named sums it up: “If we manage to renew even 10 of our tier II cities in the process, it would mean a great deal for India.“