Smart Cities and Cloud Computing :- Impact on lives of people.

 Introduction :- 

According to Census 2011, Cities accommodate nearly 31% of India's current population and contribute 63% of GDP. Urban areas are expected to house 40% of India's population and contribute 75% of India's GDP by 2030. This requires comprehensive development of physical, institutional, social and economic infrastructure. All are important in improving the quality of life and attracting people and investment.

Cities are truly the engines of growth today that needs a holistic approach. To meet the overarching aspirations of growing urban population and sustain a virtuous cycle of growth and development, development of Smart Cities has become crucial. However, the Smart Cities Mission calls for appropriate local spatial development plans.

The Smart Cities Mission is an innovative and new flagship initiative by the Government of India to drive economic growth and improve the quality of life of people by enabling local development and harnessing technology as a means to create smart outcomes for citizens.

The Mission will cover 100 cities and its duration will be five years from 2015 to 2020. The Mission is implemented by the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD). SCM will be operated as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme (CSS) where in the central Government proposes to provide financial support up to Rs. 100 crore per city per year. An equal amount, on a matching basis, will have to be contributed by the State/ULB

Impotance of Smart Cities :- 

Smart city means different things to different people; for some it is a very technologically advanced city and for some it means getting all the basic necessities for a normal lifestyle. Smart city basically consists of all those aspects which make a city better like waste management, water management, better standard of living, good transportation and security for every citizen. Smart cities are also known as Future Smart Cities due to the fact that they comprise of basic amenities with upgraded and newer technologies which will ease the life of citizens.

Making our cities smart is thus a bold move by our government because they are revised with what development is needed and how much time it will take. There are a lot of feedbacks in our society by the people on whether or not the ‘Smart City’ initiative will benefit the life on Indians.

The smart city plan suggests simple solutions for our day-to-day complex needs. There are multiple solutions which will ease the life of citizens if they are implemented in a city. In a smart city, the information and communication technology (ICT) is used for super intelligent and efficient use of resources and cost through energy savings which in turn provides improved quality of life and reduced environmental footprint.

The ICT technology makes use of the current data of the city and which state it is in so that quality changes can be made in real-time. With growing needs of our increasing population, we need to implement those solutions and provide those facilities which an individual can benefit from and can better his living conditions.Impact analysis on differenet spheres of life in daily lives can be analysed in following dimensions :- 

• Transportation:- We have already started implementing GPS systems in our vehicle where we can detect the location of the vehicle or a person as the GPS system also helps in making our drive smooth by avoiding traffic congestion and helping us to reach our destination in minimum time. We use smart traffic sensors which avoids accidents by collecting data on peak traffic hours. Our streets are much safer after we have installed cameras and traffic signal sensors which record the movements of vehicle to guide us at the right time. For parking your vehicle, we have implemented smart parking solutions which alerts the person concerned to park your car whenever there is a vacant parking spot in crowded parking area.
• Efficient use of energy:- Planning the use of energy in the entire city is a very important task because smartly distributing the energy for commercial building, homes, schools and hospitals is important and there should be no power failure, so the energy should be consumed responsibly.
• Smart Homes:- We finally have smart homes in India which comprises of smart appliances inside the house which are connected to the internet and we can access it through our smartphones. Intelligent cooling, smart lights are some of the examples of smart homes.

As the smart city project will definitely generate a lot of digital footprint of the citizens, there will be questions raised regarding the privacy of the citizen’s data. But then again with all these solutions for the smart city, there can be a smart solution for security which won’t let any person misuse or steal an individual’s private data.

Cloud computing and Smart cities :- 

• In a smart city there are various softwares and applications which connect, fetches and manages data from a set of devices such as sensors and softwares that generate real time information, intelligence and analytics which aims to transform the overall city. It is understood that there is enormous amount of heterogeneous data generated by the applications, but to handle such high capacity of data we need larger silos and high compute power, thus the latest developments in smart cities is the adoption of cloud computing.
• Smart cities needs to make use of various Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions to monitor functions in the city and also needs the capacity to manage and process this large scale data in real time in a specific manner. The cloud eases big data storage, integration, processing and analysis of data in certain time frame.
• There are various services on cloud which smart cities can use for their benefits in delivering the best in diverse business and technological domains by offering internet based service delivery that encourages creation of services which are based on domain independent service delivery platform.
• Cloud computing enhances sharpness, speed and cost savings by providing on demand access, through a network to a pool of shared computing resources which can be quickly provisioned and scaled as needed.
• Cloud computing offers a big platform for Smart Cities and offer services which domain specific applications require and drive all system component design and determine most of the technical choices, ranging from smart devices to sensors to middleware components and computing infrastructure.

By: Shashank Shekhar