By: Nandan Nilekani
As part of its 25th anniversary celebrations in the city, the Economic Times is pleased to present daily columns from some of the city's brightest minds on ways to improve Bangalore's appeal as a major global hub for business, innovation and entrepreneurship. We start with Nandan Nilekani, who talks about his ideas for creating a smart network for managing city services.
In 1961, the then US president John F Kennedy had reminded his country of its unique position in the world. We are, he said, "a city upon a hill — the eyes of all people are upon us" . In a different time and in a different continent, these words ring as true. Bangalore is the "city upon a hill" , a place that holds a unique position and perspective for India — it has served as a bellwether for change, the place where socioeconomic transitions take place before they sweep across the rest of the country. Bangalore's unusual role has come from the kind of growth it witnessed since the 1970s.
Urbanisation in the city was driven significantly by the rise of high technology industries through the 1970s and 1980s, when the establishment of large public sector companies in defence , aviation, electronics, and research institutions led to significant immigration and population growth. The establishment and rise of the IT services industry in the city in the 1980s and 1990s only sharpened this trend. The nature of its growth created a city population that has been disproportionately well-educated and English-literate , as well as comfortable and familiar with technology. And, as part of a state that experienced the demographic dividend early on, in the 1980s and 1990s — unlike north India, which is going through the dividend now — Bangalore has already witnessed the benefits of a young workforce and large-scale migration, as well as the linguistic and community tensions that came with it.
The rise of the IT services industry , whose clients were more global than domestic, also made Bangalore a more globalised city compared to the rest of urban India, bringing in knowledge of English, as well as know-how in world-class infrastructure and systems. Thanks to the familiarity with global IT systems and infrastructure , Bangalore's commercial establishments have experimented with smart buildings , state-of-the-art road infrastructure and water management within their IT parks, renewable energy, and energy efficient initiatives.
EXPERIMENTS IN GOVERNANCE
Bangalore was also fortunate in that it is a young city that experienced fairly rapid growth since the 1970s, and consequently does not have the entrenched interest groups that have limited urban areas of similar size and scale.
IT Harnessed to Deliver Public Services
This has allowed Bangalore to emerge as the place where experiments in governance and public-private IT investment took place, before they occurred in the rest of India. Early efforts, for example, included the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), which embraced the idea that city governance should focus less on the sub-division of authority, and more on the collaborative accomplishment of urban goals.
In the years that followed, we have seen urban cities and towns across India experiment with similar partnerships in improving governance. Governments are also now embracing initiatives similar to Bangalore One, where technology is utilised to deliver public services to residents faster and more effectively.
Building a smart network
In recent years, India's governments have worked to leverage IT connectivity and mobile phone use, in order to expand access to services, deliver scarce resources to a large, geographically diverse population , and improve accountability in delivery . Such efforts are becoming critical in urban India, where the governments are facing immense pressures across resources , from water availability to waste management. Bangalore, with its urban, IT-savvy population, and its history in governance innovation , has the capacity to lead these efforts. The city is already highly connected with a teledensity well over 80%. It has the tools as well as local expertise to implement truly "smart" urban management systems, that are tailored to the kind of collaborative infrastructure building that Bangalore helped pioneer .
For example, city-wide information systems linked to smart metres in commercial buildings as well as residential complexes could monitor energy and water consumption ; efficiency of waste disposal systems, identify shortages and problems in real-time ; online traffic analytics to identify bottlenecks before they occur; a statewide electronic system to collate information from across departments and agencies in order to track and publish details of public expenditure. What we would thus have is a city-wide information network oriented towards delivering services effectively. Such a network would receive data from buildings, traffic sensors, as well as mobile phones, to monitor and utilise the resources. This would complement environmental sustainability efforts, by enabling public and private agencies to identify and control wastage, proactively track the implementation of regulations in say, energy and water use, and manage resources in the most effective way possible.
Participatory infrastructure
Such smart city architecture could pave the way for more participatory social and economic systems. In such a system, local government, private agencies as well as independent , non-profit organisations would be able to collaborate towards better governance. It would enable governments to track resource shortages and local poverty problems more effectively, giving rise to public programmes that are more inclusive , and more focused on individual needs.
Governments for example, may receive school-wise information on dropouts , and vocational programmes could be earmarked and offered to these individuals in real-time . Shared data would mean much greater transparency in governance. With mobile phones, the data that governments publish on say, the progress of a road-building project and details of public spending, would be easily and instantly accessible to residents . Such a smart information network would allow us to build infrastructure that is more participatory, and to which residents can actively contribute the widespread use of mobiles would also enable city residents to connect to the state information networks, independently report public transport and waste disposal challenges , and report pollution problems, and track the resolution of these issues.
If there is a place for such an IT-enabled transformation to begin, it would be in Bangalore, where we have the necessary human capital, infrastructure base, and familiarity with standardised processes and systems. Bangalore could lead the way for a truly transformed urban vision, one which draws all eyes, and sets an admirable example of the efficient, networked and liveable cities that we can build across the country.
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