Bhopal Smart City is bullish on IoT for upcoming projects, says Chandramauli Shukla

The state mission director of Madhya Pradesh took the decision to create an Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC) for the seven cities. This is a pioneering project as this is the first time that seven cities in India will have a common command centre. Chandramauli Shukla, Chief Executive Officer, Bhopal Smart City Development Corporation, Bhopal (BSCDCL) shares more

A technology like IoT plays a critical role in the success of the initiative, as it provides real time data, which helps in analysis and taking more informed and accurate decisions for the citizens.

Areas in which IoT is being used
BSCDCL has planned to implement IoT enabled devices in almost all the upcoming solutions where it needs to gather information which can help the corporation in better city operations, management of assets and taking informed decisions. These include smart LED lights, environmental sensors, Intelligent Traffic Management Systems, etc.

Measurement of RoI and relevance of IoT
There are several use cases of IoT enabled devices. “In short, we are targeting the solutions to be intelligent enough to proactively report rather than citizen informing about incidents or interruptions of services to take proactive and informed decisions. In case of citizen services, we don’t emphasise on the RoI in monetary terms. If we are able to provide essential services on time for example, if we are able to help the citizen and save the citizen’s life by providing ambulances at right time, at right places, we can’t really equate that in monetary terms,” says Shukla.

With the help of IoT devices, BSCDCL can now view the real time status of various city functions and devices, it helps in better management of day-to-day operations, and provide better services to citizen and most importantly, it provides insights and works as decision support system to take informed decisions.

While there are various use cases of IoT, some of the basic ones are: it can be used to manage traffic especially during traffic jams, peak hours, accidents, and rains. It can be used to manage street lights and automatically switch them off during the day and switch them on at the onset of darkness.

“Our ICT solution architecture is scalable and modular in design. We can always add on the numbers of IoT devices. As of now, we have capacity to integrate one lakh IoT devices on our platform,” states Shukla.

AI enabled platform
BSCDCL’s platform is AI enabled which is able to give all kinds of required insights – the platform is hosted on cloud. “As mentioned earlier, we plan to integrate more than one lakh IoT devices through our Command Centre platform including 20,000 smart lights (to be increased in future up to lakhs), environmental sensors, Wi-Fi hotspots, CCTV cameras (approximately 1,000), city wide Water SCADA and Electric SCADA smart metres,” adds Shukla.

IoT investments
BSCDCL has not categorised investments into IoT and non-IoT categories. In some of the projects, its investment is NIL like in the case of smart poles. Smart Pole project is being implemented on PPP mode with zero investment. Smart poles have environmental sensors, Wi-Fi, smart lights and CCTV cameras.