A 31-year-old Smart Cities Mission Fellow, Azhagu Pandian Raja MP, who developed the Greater Chennai Corporation corona monitoring mobile app and the Madras Waste Exchange portal, has now been appointed as the first innovation officer of the civic body, becoming the first such appointee in the country.

Azhagu told a prominent media source that previously only government officials worked on urban challenges and projects or problem-solving. The innovation hub would now ensure that researchers, college students and even journalists and thinkers can be brought in to brainstorm on solutions and hackathons are also being planned, said Azhagu.

He added the innovation hub would interact with various civic body wings, and solutions thus devised, would be included in the governance process.

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Mentioning that the medium-term plan is to ensure the innovation hub becomes a solid think tank for Tamil Nadu, Azhagu said that the innovation hub would have space for small companies and chalk out IT-enabled solutions.

Azhagu claimed that the hub would have a space for developing hundreds of such ideas.

The Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) said this was to bring in better ‘process innovation’ as the current systems were outdated.

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