Wikis, Virtual Cards To Revolutionise Pune City

Pune, the second largest city in the state of Maharashtra, has grown tremendously in recent years. The city now holds the credit of appointing the first ever CIO in India, which clearly indicates the importance its citizens attribute to accountability of the government.

Dr Anupam Saraph, CIO, Pune City, is a lateral and system thinker and is well known today for creating the first worldwide governance wiki (Giki). Dr Saraph is spearheading the ICT revolution in the city. Biztech2.0, in an interaction with Dr Saraph, tries to understand the role of a city CIO.

It’s been almost a year since you have been serving as the CIO of Pune City. What kind of IT initiatives has the city seen in the past year?

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My vision for Pune in 2015 comprises a number of projects that will leverage ICT for betterment of the city. Among the ones which have been implemented is Pune Wiki. Since its launch in July last year, Pune Wiki has grown manifold and today baosts of 500 pages. The wiki has helped various stakeholders of the city to come together on various issues and address pressing issues. We also have the Pune card initiative, which we started working on in September last year. It’s almost ready for launch and we paln to deploy the pilot at Zensar next month. This is being developed in association with Nasscom. We hope that Pune cards will rapidly spread across the city and maybe also to other cities.

Pune Card Project

Pune Cards is basically a virtual identity card, which every resident of Pune will be able carry with him. We will provide residents with a URL on which they would able to sign up for such a card. This card would come handy to verify the identity of individuals at various security and access points in the city. The citizen would just need to provide a sixteen digit ID number, which will enable security to raise a query either through the mobile phone or the Internet and the person’s photograph as well as information would be retrieved immediately. This will also help to deal with issues of fake identity because what you essentially have is a virtual ID card.

The Pune cards platform is completely based on open source and is developed on LAMP technology. It will be put on public domain as open source, where anyone would be able to use it for running an application or creating widgets.

Citizen GIS System

We have also developed a citizen GIS system. The idea behind this is to have a public GIS map. Let us imagine a scenario wherein the electricity departments of the city or state could upload their schedule for digging and pole movement, the road department can upload their plan for road maintenance on this public GIS map. Citizens will then be able to access all this information uploaded on the map. This will enable people to plan their commute routes and would also help in better traffic management.

Besides, citizens would be able to query the system, for example can I take my visitors from this particular pavement? Citizens will also be able to annotate restaurants, cinema halls and other such places in the city to give their reviews and opinions.

We have also launched something we call ‘Twit for Pune’, which is inspired by Twitter.com, which allows you to do micro blogging. We are trying to tap the power of twitter in order to disseminate information about several things happening in the city to various citizens as well as government agencies. If one citizen encounters a lot of traffic on his way to office, he can actually tweet about this from his mobile phone, laptop or PC. These tweets are in turn being harvested and put on the Pune wiki page. For example, in the above case, the info will go on the page related to traffic. We are also going to launch a project, which will allow bus agencies to tweet about bus cancellations.

What is your vision concerning city resources planning or CRP?

According to me, every city requires a city resources planning (CRP) exercise. CRP essentially involves planning about what kind of resources the city would require over the next 10 to 20 years. The Pune metropolitan area houses five million people today. The city population is growing at a rapid pace. If the current pace continues, Pune is going to be a 20-million people city within the next 20 years. With this kind of population, you need to think about what kind of mobility, housing, energy and water resources the city would require in the coming years. Thus, you need to have an information system which is going to cater to 20 million and not just 5 million people. If you don’t start building for tomorrow now, you might be too late.

I would say that every city in India needs to look at City Resources Planning, which stretches across different government agencies and is not constrained to just the municipal body so that information is managed in a co-ordinated way.

The concept of City CIO is relatively novel in our country. Could you briefly describe the role of a city CIO? Do you think other cities will soon have their own CIOs?

The role of a city CIO is all about creating connections and collaboration. I think it is important for every Indian city to bring stakeholders together, so that they can find shared grounds and work together for common goals. There are many issues that all our urban centres face and CIOs can effectively bring stakeholders together to resolve these issues.

I do look forward to other cities in the country having their own CIOs. It’s a very do-able and replicable model. I would like to see it happening in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad. I would be more than glad to extend any support to make this happen.

What are some of the major issues that you have come across in your role as the CIO of Pune city?

While having CIOs for cities is a common phenomenon in the West, this is the first time we are seeing something like this in India and hence there is no precedent to this model. It is a public private partnership initiative and people are still getting used to it. I think people need to understand that I don’t belong to any government agency. They need to understand that multiple agencies need to come together to tap the power of such an office.

According to you, what are some of the major issues that lead to the failure of e-governance projects in the country?

e-Governance projects are pretty complicated as they involve a lot of stakeholders. However, traditionally e-governance is looked upon as a domain of the government. I think we are missing the point that we are actually talking about public information systems. Public information systems consist of many stakeholders and unless you involve all of them and understand their unique requirements, the project may not reach the desired level of success. We also need to realise that the mechanism of governance cannot be frozen or static; it needs to evolve and change constantly.