Suggestions for A Smart City, from Goa IT Professionals Goa IT Professionals goa...@gmail.com
The Goa IT Professionals, a group of young Goan professionals working in the infotech sector, came up with some suggestions what could help the state-capital of Panjim to become a 'smart city'. See http://bit.ly/1NhhcL7 They say their suggestions are based on the principles of greater emphasis on public transport as against personal vehicles; imposing penalties only after implementing fundamental infrastructure; tackling problems at their source; and the application of technology. See more about the group at http://www.goaitpro.org --------------------------------------------------------------- Concrete, feasible suggestions centered around: * Transport * City planning * Waste Management * Sanitation * Energy * EGovernance TRANSPORT: FOCUS ON PUBLIC TRANSPORT The preferred approach to decongest the city should be to focus of public transport rather than roadwidening or multilevel parking. Allocate buses with two doors, one at the front and one at the rear. Let there be a strict protocol of getting in from the rear and getting of from front door. This allows the driver to be aware that passengers are getting off and eliminates the need for the conductor to keep a watch on whether somebody needs to get off. The conductor can focus on collecting the bus fare. Right from the beginning, introduce bus passes which are monthly and weekly. This eliminates the hassle of maintaining change. Allow city entry for personal vehicles with odd registration number on Mon, Wed, Friday and even number on Tue, Thu, Saturday. If vehicle owners want exception to this rule, provide a tag to be fixed on the windshield at a price of Rs 1000 per year. Areas that get released by the military should be used for setting up minibus stands. These are close to the market and should enable citizens to do their weekend shopping without their personal vehicle. Opening times of certain institutions should be staggered so that inflow of people into and out of the city is spread through the day. Instead of having a 9am-6pm working hours for all offices, allow some departments to work 10am-7pm and 8am to 5pm. Conduct training for private and public bus operators on basic manners so that passengers are not heckled due to rude comments. With reduction in traffic, there should be no need to blow horns. Honking in the city should be made a punishable offence. Apart from a monetary penalty, the offender should be made to perform community service for one full day. Fines should be imposed on vehicles that are found to emit excessive smoke. The PUC is just a certificate. The actual emission is what matters to keep the air clean. The city is small enough to be covered by bicycle. Even if creating dedicated cycle tracks is difficult, the use of this mode can be encouraged by creating bicycle parking stands, where people can lock their bicycles. CITY PLANNING: FINDABLE, DURABLE AND SAFER The city should have boards in such a way that someone unfamiliar with the city can locate any place based solely on the address without having to ask questions and without a smartphone. Road contracts should be awarded only with international standards. Strict guarantees should be defined. These cannot be one or two years but at least 20 years. Such roads do exist in India and have been used with heavy traffic since the British times. Application of road engineering and scientific methods makes this possible. Contracts should include the plotting of a median at the center of the road as well as drains at the side of the road. Departments need to coordinate so that no road is dug multiple times. All pipes and cables should be laid only during roadrepair. The roads should be safe even for pregnant women, people suffering from spondylitis and senior citizens. No speedbreaker should be installed in the city. Instead, traffic cops should be deployed to issue fines for speeding and to confiscate driving licenses of offenders. Like in any civilised society, markets should be made a lot less noisy. If vendors are made to write the price of goods on a blackboard or a whiteboard, there will be no need to shout out the prices for customers. WASTE MANAGEMENT: PENALISE PLASTICS, GARBAGE BINS NEEDED As is done in some cities of the country, vendors should be penalized for giving away plastic bags. Today every shopkeeper pulls out a plastic bag even if it is not asked for. Garment/ grocery/ shoe stores should be made to charge an extra Rs 10 is the customer needs a bag. It will be a 'smart' move to reduce the garbage problem before trying to solve it. Covered garbage bins allow for orderly collection of garbage and provides a place for people to drop waste rather than dropping along the road. At any location in the city, a garbage bin should be found within 50m radius. The concept of a bin-free city has been tried in Nagpur and failed miserably. Garbage bins are a proven way to organise waste management. In the presence of garbage bins, if somebody is found littering the streets, a penalty of Rs 1000 should be imposed and the offender should be made to work at a garbage treatment plant for five days. A Recyclable Waste collection center should be setup on the first Sunday of each month in each ward of the city. These could include packaging boxes, milk packets, e-waste, etc. Citizens should be awarded Smart Points based on the waste deposited. These points should be allowed to be used for obtaining passes for stage shows, movies, etc. similar to credit card points. SANITATION: KEEP OUT THE STINK Odourless public toilets have been operational in advanced countries for decades. There is no reason why these cannot be set up in Goa. Paid public toilets should be installed at several places. The toilets should have contactless taps and contactless soap dispensing machines. People found defecating or urinating in the open should be fined and also made to work at a Sewage Treatment Plant. ENERGY: SOLAR IS THE WAY TO GO The City Corporation should waive off 10% tax on residential and commercial establishment that deploy solar panels. Street lights should be powered by solar as well as electrical energy. These should turn off or on based on luminosity. If a streetlight fails to light up at night, the system should be alerted automatically so that it can be replaced the next day. E GOVERNANCE: WORK SMARTER, NOT HARDER Electricity and water bills, should be payable by an autodebit facility which debits the savings account or a credit card account automatically on the due date. Such facilities are offered by banks such as HDFC. The utility companies need to register with these banks as billers. There should be a single user ID that can be used across government websites, rather than having citizens create one login per website. This is known as singlesignon (SSO). People with Google/Facebook/Yahoo login IDs should also be able to login without registering explicitly. Any Egovernance project should be implemented such that the same can be extended to other parts of the state. Procedures that are applicable to Panaji are also applicable to any other city and hence the projects once developed for Panaji should be deployed for all other cities eventually. A common ticketing tool could be implemented for all government work in all offices like Mamlatdar, Collectorate, Panchayats, PWD, Electricity, etc. Doing this could enable single window system. A fixed process flow could be decided that will help the public and save them the hassles of going pillar to post. Public could check the status of their Service request online or on their phone. This will ensure better accountability and transparency. Efforts should be initiated to create a paperless environment for all government work. Doing so will save a lot of trees. Identity proofs like DL, PAN Card, Ration Card could be referenced online instead of attaching physical carbon copies (plus the overhead of attesting the same by the authorities).