Barriers to the Development of Smart Cities in Indian Context

Smart city development is gaining considerable recognition in the systematic literature and international policies throughout the world. The study aims to identify the key barriers of smart cities from a review of existing literature and views of experts in this area. This work further makes an attempt on the prioritisation of barriers to recognise the most important barrier category and ranking of specific barriers within the categories to the development of smart cities in India. Through the existing literature, this work explored 31 barriers of smart cities development and divided them into six categories. This research work employed fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique to prioritise the selected barriers. Findings reveal that ‘Governance’ is documented as the most significant category of barriers for smart city development followed by ‘Economic; ‘Technology’; ‘Social’; ‘Environmental’ and ‘Legal and Ethical’. In this work, authors also performed sensitivity analysis to validate the findings of study. This research is useful to the government and policymakers for eradicating the potential interferences in smart city development initiatives in developing countries like India

Constitutional Impediments to Decentralization in the World\u27s Largest Federal Country

Decentralization is often advocated as a means of improving local democracy and enhancing what economists call allocative efficiency. In federal countries, where power is already divided between national and state governments, decentralization involves the devolution of power from state to local governments. The world’s largest federal country, India, took an unusual step to advance decentralization: it passed the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act to confer constitutional status on municipalities. However, India’s efforts to promote the devolution of power through a national urban renewal scheme have not succeeded for three reasons. The first is that India’s decentralization process is incomplete. Political decentralization has been stymied by the language of the constitutional amendment itself; administrative decentralization has been hampered by the comparative advantage of entrenched state-level institutions; and fiscal decentralization has not occurred because financial responsibility—but not significant revenue—has been devolved. The second reason is that decentralization has been undertaken in a top-down manner, which has exacerbated Center-state relations and mitigated the goal of allocative efficiency. Third is the relative weakness of local governance structures, which has created a Catch-22 situation: as long as the local governments lack significant capacity, the states are reluctant to devolve power to them. Additional effort needs to be directed towards an effective model of cooperative federalism. With Prime Minister Narendra Modi poised to create “smart cities” and promote urban renewal, it is critical to understand why India’s prior decentralization efforts have largely failed. The lessons learned over the past decade are an important guide to the future of cities in India as well as in other federal countrie

Prospects of electric vehicles in the developing countries : a literature review

Electric mobility offers a low cost of travel along with energy and harmful emissions savings. Nevertheless, a comprehensive literature review is missing for the prospects of electric vehicles in developing countries. Such an overview would be instrumental for policymakers to understand the barriers and opportunities related to different types of electric vehicles (EVs). Considering the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis (PRISMA) guidelines, a systematic review was performed of the electronic databases Google Scholar and Web of Science for the years 2010–2020. The electric four-wheelers, hybrid electric vehicles and electric two-wheeler constituted the electric vehicles searched in the databases. Initially, 35 studies identified in the Web of Science that matched the criteria were studied. Later, 105 other relevant reports and articles related to barriers and opportunities were found by using Google Scholar and studied. Results reveal that electric four-wheelers are not a feasible option in developing countries due to their high purchase price. On the contrary, electric two-wheelers may be beneficial as they come with a lower purchase price

Low carbon technology transfer: lessons from India and China

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Energy Information Systems: From the Basement to the Boardroom

A significant buildings energy reduction opportunity exists in the office sector, given that this market segment typically is an early adopter of new technology. There is a rising trend towards smart and connected offices through the internet of things (IoT) that provides new opportunities for operational efficiency and environmental sustainability practices. Leading commercial real estate companies have begun to shift from individual building automation systems (BAS) to partially integrated and automated systems such as energy information systems (EIS). In both the United States and India, organizations are seeking operational excellence, enhanced tenant relationships, and topline growth. Hence it is imperative to engage the executives with decision-making power, by tapping into their interest in sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and innovation. This expansion of interest can enable data-driven decisions, strong energy investments, and deeper energy benefits, and would drive innovation in this field. However, none of this would be possible without robust, consistent building energy information to provide visibility across all the levels of decision making, i.e. from the basement where the facilities staff take operational action to the boardroom where the executives make investment decisions. Price, security, and ease of use remain barriers to the adoption and pervasive use of promising EIS technologies in commercial office buildings. We believe that these barriers can be addressed through the development of ready, simplified, consistent, commercially available, low-cost EIS-in-a-box packages, that have a pre-defined set of hardware components and software features and functionality that are pertinent to a particular building sector. These simplified, sector-specific EIS packages can help to obviate the need for customization, and enhance ease of use, thereby enabling scale-up, in order to facilitate building energy savings. The EIS-in-a-box are adaptable in both U.S. and Indian office buildings, and potentially beyond these two countries

Rapid urbanization and heritage conservation in Indian cities

The paper discusses the issue of heritage conservation in Indian cities in the face of current rapid urbanization trends. The urban development pressure, coupled with the lack of an appropriate conservation framework, is causing the loss of important cultural heritage in India. The federal Indian government has recently launched a program on smart cities to improve cities livability and embrace technological progress. The paper discusses the current policy situation and the role that urban heritage is having within the internal debate. It presents results from an experts’ workshop held in Mumbai in December 2016 and argues that a novel smartheritage approach is needed to support decision making in urban conservation

Systemische Vernetzung urbaner und ländlicher Räume – Erkennen, Formulieren, Entwerfen

Im Rahmen von Planungsvorhaben beschränken sich Kontextanalysen oftmals nur auf räumliche Veränderungsprozesse von „Land“ oder „Stadt“. Damit hierbei alle gesamtgesellschaftlichen Aspekte zielführend mitgedacht werden können, sollten diese bewusst frühzeitig maßstabsübergreifend erfasst werden. Das Aufbrechen fokussierter Planungssichten stellt hierfür einen notwenigen ersten Schritt dar. Die Systemgrenze der Betrachtungsweise sollte dabei grundlegend erweitert werden. Somit können frühzeitig wichtige Akteursgruppen und sozial-räumliche Wechselwirkungen in das Sichtfeld treten, deren ansonstenvernachlässigte Belange nur schwer bzw. nicht mehr in die laufende Planung zu integrieren sind. Analysen von verschiedenen Personen-, Waren-, Informationsströme etc. dienen als Ansatz einer vernetzten Betrachtung von „Land“ und „Stadt“. Diesem Gedanken folgend wird ein ganzheitlicher analysebasierter Planungsansatz, der zu einem integrierten Lehrkonzept für Architekturstudenten forschungsnah aufbereitet wurde, vorgestellt. Als Basis und Alleinstellungsmerkmal gegenüber der klassischen Entwurfsausbildung wird eine breitgefächerte Potentialanalyse an den Anfang einer planerischen Entwurfsaufgabe gestellt. Praxisnahe Lehrveranstaltungen, basierend auf den frühen Phasen der Projektentwicklung, schulen mit verschiedenen planerischen Instrumentarien die Studierenden, um planerische Problemstellungen zu regionalen und überregionalen Verflechtungen (Stadt-Landbeziehungen) sowie Eingriffe auf verschiedenenMaßstabsebenen wie Nachbarschaft und Quartier zu identifizieren und problemgerecht zu qualifizieren. In der weiteren Bearbeitung entsteht hieraus ein integrales, bauliches und räumliches Entwurfskonzept