The increasing role of IoT in the Govt’s ‘Smart Cities’ initiative is the result of the efforts of many stakeholders working together in tandem. That said, the government has to facilitate and create an environment to encourage the creation of smart and innovative solutions. “Governments are setting up strategies and partnerships to shape the future of smart cities. Smart cities are here to stay and the government plays a vital role in this process,” said Dr Neena Pahuja Director General, ERNET on the sidelines of the National IoT summit, India.
Showing concerns over growing import of products and devices, Alphons Kannanthanam, Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology and Minister of Tourism (Independent Charge) said, “Can we sustain our IT sector by just doing backend work? IoT comes with the promise of big business opportunity and innovation that has the potential to digitally transform India into a knowledge economy.”
Since IoT is still nascent in India, it is very essential to create an ecosystem by participation of academia, government and industry, including start-ups. All the stakeholders need to take initiatives to promote capacity building, R&D, innovation and large scale deployments. Evolving standards for interoperability and use cases need to be addressed at the early stages. Human resources development and re-skilling of existing workforce in the industry are also important component of the ecosystems.
The ministry has been also taking several steps to promote IoT in the country. “Our ministry jointly with Nasscom has set up a center of excellence (CoE) for IoT in Bengaluru with partnership of Govt of Karnataka and Industry. The objective of the CoE for IoT is to enable India as an innovation hub in IoT through democratization of innovation and realization of prototypes,” said he.
The center will promote design, prototype and manufacturing ecosystems for IoT by harnessing and creating capacity with academia, start-ups and technology providers. Around twenty seven start-ups have already been incubated in the center and around 12IPRs have been filed by start-ups incubated in the center. One patent has been received by the incubated start-up.
While the vision of devices working together and feeding data to cloud based applications in order to provide value though Big data analytics is often associated with connected products, it is also making its way to other domains and we are now hearing about industrial internet of things (IIOT) where the data from thousand of sensors in the field or the plant floor will allow optimized productivity and resource usage in real time, bringing about industry 4.0, the new industrial revolution.
