Smart Cities Mission was one of the most prominent announcements of the government. Urban planners are increasingly fond of using the word “smarter” for their urban areas. In the quest to make our cities both safer and smarter, we are layering one new technology on top of another. Technological innovations are being used to make cities safer. City-wide Wi-Fi, use of sensors, video analytics, automated access are starting to show up in Indian cities too. These technologies converge to bring in torrents of data to cloud for meaningful analytics that funnels back to our city planners in understanding their city planning better.

However, as we continue to layer technologies, the interplay between technology and service delivery becomes more complicated. As we focus more and more on safety, our basic tenets of citizen privacy and their fundamental rights pose some challenging questions. For a city to be truly smarter and safer, we need to deliver systems that make the citizen communities happier and thriving.

This increased dependence on technologies in the air will imply that we pay equal cognitive effort in planning for the safety of our technological backbone. Our extreme reliance on our critical infrastructure, command, and control centers should demand extreme measures in protecting them. The cities of the future have to be safer, smarter, and resilient. Preventing and managing incidents, emergencies, and disasters has to be part of the planning at the conception. For any city to be truly smart city, the citizen safety and privacy have to be the basic premise.

At the ‘Safe Smart City Conference,’ our goal will be to review the progress so far, discuss what to do next. It will be a rendezvous of the government planners, executing authorities, governing civic bodies, think tank consultants, system implementers, technology solution providers, devices and sensors suppliers. Together, the discussion should be on the direction for the year 2025 and how do we make Indian Cities Safer and Smarter.