Making Guwahati a Data Smart city

Guwahati figures among India's smart cities but is not so smart in harnessing data to find solutions to its pressing problems. The gateway to India's northeast has been ranked 62nd among 100 smart cities by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs under its Data Maturity Assessment Framework. The framework is a competitive benchmarking amongst these 100 mart cities prepared by the Ministry to help the city planners and executives build a collaborative data ecosystem to improve city functioning. Kohima city has been ranked among the top ten smart cities under the framework with a score of 60 against Guwahati's score of 21. Agartala ranked 28th with a 39 score, Itanagar ranked 36th with a score of 35, Aizawl ranked 58th with a score of 23 are also well ahead of Guwahati. The ranks and the scores explain why Guwahati has been certified as 'beginner' while Kohima has been certified 'enabled' while Agartala and Itanagar have been certified as 'Initiator' in the adoption of data smart strategy. They also reflect that Guwahati is not yet fully ready for intelligent use of data in addressing its challenges like traffic management, waterlogging, safety and security of its citizens, smart street lighting, smart parking and smart governance and citizens' services. Surat with the highest score of 80, ranked the top smart city and certified as a 'connected' city has set the benchmark for Guwahati to achieve the objective of a smart city. The Data-Smart Cities Strategy framed under the Smart Cities Mission of the Ministry lays down the basic premise, fundamental pillars, and suggested roadmap for cities for leveraging data generated by system and processes in addressing complex urban challenges. The burgeoning traffic in Guwahati due to its rapid growth has pushed the city to its limit and its management requires gathering and processing real-time data of actual traffic loads in different roads during peak hours, off-peak hours, during the day, during the night and integrating with the smart traffic lighting system. Multimodal traffic makes the decision making of regulating the flow with smart traffic lighting more complex and challenging. The decision to construct a flyover in the city and its design needs to consider the real-time big data of traffic and projected growth of the city population and traffic vis-à-vis limited space for expansion of roads and by-lanes. A robust data policy, which is one of the key benchmarks of a data smart city, will ensure that only data that is relevant for decision making in addressing the city's challenges are collected. Orienting the data policy from the perspectives of improving the city life better and comfortable for the people, application of technology and outcomes determines the maturity of the city leaders in leveraging big data for a smart city. Perfect data ecosystem will present a clear picture of the growth of traffic concerning rising city population, its importance as the seat of administration, as a gateway to the northeast, better road, rail and air connectivity, a nerve centre of state politics, as an important national and international sports arena, availability of the roads in the past and the present. Analysis of such big data will be useful in the diagnosis of the city traffic problem and predict what is most likely to happen in the future if a certain decision is not implemented now and pragmatic changes in the city planning are not initiated for the future. Under framework data availability, data usage, data shareability and data management together determine sectoral data maturity of the smart cities. Research work, studies were done by universities, colleges and other institutions have already led to the generation of useful data for the city and various aspects of city planning. Collaboration of Guwahati Smart City Corporation Limited as well as Guwahati Development Department, Guwahati Metropolitan Development Authority, Guwahati Municipal Corporation with Gauhati University, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, Assam Engineering College, Cotton University and various colleges and other institutions of the state can help avoid replication of data collection work and improve quality of data analysis. Assam Police have also built a huge database on crime and issues related to law and order. Collaboration between the city governance institutions and the Assam Police can lead to smart solutions that will make the city a safer place. This will require the smart city authorities to have a strong and well-trained team of data coordinators, data analysts, data scientist, statistician, data engineers, web developers and a dedicated budget to meet the financial requirements. Guwahati ranked 46th among 49 cities with a million-plus population ranked by the Ministry for Ease of Living Index 2020 and the city ranked at the bottom in Municipal Performance Index 2020 for 51 cities with a million-plus population as the city lacks basic amenities and delivery of services. Making Guwahati data smart will also make it the most liveable city.