India is a Rapidly urbanising country with over 377 Million people living in urban areas in 2011. For a country that is so heavily and rapidly urbanised, there is little to no "Urban Planning" that is being done, resulting in Haphazard growth of cities and a dysfunction web of departments offering service delivery
This phenomena of rapid urbanisation can be attributed to a multitude of parameters ranging from Changing demographic, social factors, employment oppurtunities etc.. But whats alarming is the aftermath of unmanaged and unplanned urbanisation, leading to various chanllenged that both contrubute and get a/ffected by climate change. For this to happen, Cities need to grow more resilient. Resilient to climate chage and its effects, resilient to economic fluctuations, resilient to infrastructure failures
Currently, neither our cities, nor the institutions and the institutional frameworks steering the cities are equipped with resources, tools and expertise to handle urbanisation. And the way our institutions are setup and operate is the key to managing a city. Majority of the citys functions and decisions can be data driven, be it traffic, Water, Waste, Electricity...and many more. Currently all this data is siloed and doesnt operate cross departments, which leads to this issue haphazardness. This is where AI can potentially plugin and be a gamechanger.
The key idea of this concept is to intensify the interactions between the departments. It is imperative that data is the most valued commodity of this era. Every department generates multitudes of data through their serice delivery and it is barely digitised. Imagine multiple stream of data coming from various departments synthesising to give you real time data driven insight. If the particulars of your water supply and consumption talk to your electricity consumption to give real time insights on your consumption. Imagine the ticketing information from the busses helps optimise frequency of the busses according to the day of time
There could be a ton of smart urban solutions that can be tailor made to cities across india, according to their intricasises. but the core to solve this issue is the data and how it flows in the system. If we could strengthen these data pipelines across departments with the help of AI, it would be a gamechanger in data drivern urban oplanning and desicion making
Read more about this Concept here : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bCwj7xjZbc8hPDIJC73ddn19fQTPiMlw21UEHACz5zs/edit
Adopting a dynamic, data-driven and an AI powered approach to Master Plans enhances their adaptability, allowing for real-time urban development insights and decision-making, thereby significantly improving urban planning and management outcomes
Urban services can become interoperable once the core data where the interactions primarily happen do have identifiers that can aggreagate multiple datasets. This will not only help to deploy citizen services faster, but can be crucial to aggregate data but to analyse and present it to beaurocrats who can than take informed decision making.
This digitalised version of the ultimate realbe built with a key feature of decentralised nature in mind. This should be an environment and a platform for seamless data exchange but it should also not hold monopoly over any data. All the data would be aggregated and managed by concerned departments only
Functionally breaking down, Every Infrastructure component in a city is broken down to either an asset or a service, usually an asset that will further spinoff into delivering a service - for example the Water Supply Service you avail from your ULB is a result of the assets developed - which are your Water treatment plans, Pipelines, Taps etc. Depending on the state, there are anywhere close to 30-55 departments that can technically take a desicion to impact a piece of land. And currrently no system exists so that these departments do potentially talk to each other , which currently leads to all sorts of chaos. So the key is to build a ata exchange system traversing across departments that can seamlessly communicate relevant attributes.
The core skeletal data required for a cities functioning is currently held by various departments transcending between governance units like local bodies, state central governments and a plethora of parastatal agencies. While cities aim to become "Data Smart", where information is the biggest power of modern times, The future of Governance is data-driven and Indiancities are beginning to adopt this change in their functioning. Bringing data in ‘focus’ ensures a move towards outcome-based planning in governance.
The issue however as discussed earlier in the hypothesis, lies in the sheer fact that currently, little to no information exchange exists across departments. and even if this data exists, there is a high probability thst the data that exists is analog, mostly stored in papers or binders. Assuming the data is actually stored digitally, it is often done in Spreadsheets and Word document, often with a lack of standardisation and the methods and methodologies pre digital age, and the granularity of the data is often filtered down
A classic example of this is how we approach "GIS based Master Plans" in our country. Each city that undergoes this assignment undergoes collection of gigabytes of data from 50 odd departments that attribute to either constructing, operating, maintaining assets and services across the city. All this data is manually collected, condensed into GIS , and an elaborate "landuse plan" is prepared. This plan is then condensed and and analysed into a bunch of PDF files and Maps, which are often printed , signed, scanned using mobile phones, and then uploaded into websites.