With the Imagine Panaji Smart City Development Ltd, the special purpose vehicle having finalised the installation of a “smart city management system”, the officials behind it have yet to convince us that this is more than just an artificial exercise.
For those unaware, the Imagine Panaji Smart City Development has floated tenders to install a Rs 180-crore worth “Goa Intelligent City Management System” that through a network of more than 450 CCTV cameras will watch “everybody all the time” within public areas of the city.
The system is supposed to watch for traffic violations with an automatic snapping up of the number plate, and intimation to the police as well as suspicious movement of people as a preemptive system.
The system will be set up using central government funds under the smart city scheme.
However, the announcement of the project was greeted with scepticism and even mockery of the government claims on social media and elsewhere. Such sceptics only found themselves vindicated when barely a few days after the announcement, the capital city found itself without power for a continuous 22-hours with back to back power shutdowns getting to the residents.
Almost as a knee-jerk reaction, the smart city officials offered to replace the ageing power infrastructure within the city using smart city funds.
The smart city authorities have failed to convince both the ordinary citizen as well as the discerning one that this isn’t yet another colossal misadventure at the cost to the public exchequer.
More than providing a service, to make the lives of citizens better, the system appears to only be a tool for monitoring the citizens of Panaji.
A real system is one in which, enables rather than restricts. Other them helping car owners get parking spaces and monitoring traffic, the smart city management system will not significantly alter public life in the city.
Panaji has seen many plans come and go including for mass mobility and public transport management but none have been as ambitious as this. The earlier mobility plans had the power and potential to transform the city and make a tangible difference.
Those plans were simple and explained in detail, but didn’t have the funds for their implementation. The current system is ambitious in its scope, but will only promote the use of personal vehicles rather than decongest the city and not solve too many of its problems, while only being an effective enforcement tool. The current system has the funds behind it, but the plans appear sketchy and unconvincing.
According to those proposing the system, it is one that has been drawn up after taking inputs from various stakeholders and common folk before being settled upon. Yet one cannot escape the feeling that it is a replication of similar systems that have been installed in other cities by the same Larsen and Toubro that won the bid for Panaji.
The smart city authorities must realise that despite their plans, for as long as the public transport in the city is in shambles, the drains are clogged and the buses are crowded, Panaji will never be called a smart city.
