Global Business Forum to help government concretise smart cities with innovative solutions

Global Business Forum (GBF) – an innovation platform conceptualised by IIT-Bombay Alumni Association – recently announced that it plans to collaborate with the Government of India to provide solutions for enabling the 100 smart cities initiative. As per NASSCOM, the government's smart cities programme can create business opportunities to the tune of $30-40 billion for the IT sector over the next five to ten years. To turn this in to reality, GBF will follow a two pronged approach – one from the deployment side directed at the nations governance and the other addressing the consumer end directed to the citizens.

Prof Ronita Bardhan of IIT-Bombay and SIG mentor for the Smart Livable Cities, said, ‘Smart Cities' prompts the question – whether our cities already possess the latent intelligence 'in their DNA'. There are two aspects for smart cities to be a success in India – one, citizens should have the threshold motivation to react to the smart component, and two, citizens should be facilitated to be motivated for maneuvering in a smart city. Our systems need to perform in two folds. They should be able to provide a platform for inducing motivation and also enabling the infrastructure..’

The IIT GBF special interest group of Smart Livable Cities will ensure that the ideas or discussions or technologies or policies are realistic and that all elements are considered at an implementable scale. The review committee, which includes an independent group of experts will look at innovation proposals from the IIT-Bombay community specifically in the area of smart green buildings, mobility, water, solid waste, power, governance and healthcare.

Smart green buildings
One of the innovations from Prof. Ronita Bardhan that will be showcased at GBF is in the area of smart green buildings. The main objective of a green building is to provide services for a comfortable, safe and healthy environment by minimising energy consumption, environmental impact and conservation of water.

A quantitative metrics is necessary to evaluate whether the submitted intention to build a green building will actualize or not. GBF is proposing to provide an open web based platform through which any developer during his expression of interest to build a green building will have to upload his building design with other relevant parameters. The platform is enabled to compute in real time and verify the veracity of the developer’s intention and thus completely do away with the five year waiting period.

Governance
India is expected to emerge as the world’s 3rd largest construction market by 2020, by adding 11.5 million homes every year. In such a scenario, the pressing need is for innovations in the area of transparency and access. One of the prominent voices of tech start-up entrepreneurs, Advitiya Sharma, Co-Founder of Housing.com, an IIT-Bombay alumnus and participant at GBF 2015, said that “The Government of India is concentrating its efforts towards the development of 100 plus smart cities over the next decade. The biggest problem that has been plaguing the real estate industry is lack of transparency in discovery and transaction. We believe that smart cities need to be sold in a smart way! And Housing.com is focused on building revolutionary products like Slice View (World's 1st Online Home Booking Platform) to help the government achieve its goal.”

GBF 2015 will be showcasing Slice View – an innovation from Housing.com – a 3D interactive platform where users can see each slice of the building being constructed. Over the last six months, Housing.com has tied up with over 50 top builders in India and sold over 2,000 houses online, with a total Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) of $300 million.