Book Review: Recovery from Indian Ocean Tsunami: A 10 year journey

10 years back in 2004, 26th of December, the Indian Ocean Tsunami devastated several countries in Asia, and the impacts also reached to East Africa. Over last 10 years, lots of innovations were made in different aspects of disaster risk reduction. The book has 31 chapters, drawing lessons from four countries: India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. There are five sections: Overview (10 chapters), Indonesia (8 chapters), India (6 chapters), Sri Lanka (5 chapters), and Thailand (2 chapters).

One of the chapter that deals with the role of IT & GI Services in Emergency Response Management is authored by me.

http://www.springer.com/earth+sciences+and+geography/natural+hazards/book/978-4-431-55116-4

India Wants To Build Massive Digital Infrastructure To Cover 800 Million Rural Citizens by 2019

A $17-billion government program to build a national optical fiber network that will connect India’s gram panchayats, or village-level governments, aims to cover the entire country in three years and could be a game changer, an Indian minister told Forbes.
Ravi Shankar Prasad, minister of communications and IT, and the head of the advisory group which supervises the implementation of the Digital India program, as it is called, said the program was approved by the Indian cabinet last month, and aims to cover 50,000 gram panchayats this year, 100,000 next year and the remaining 100,000 the following year. India’s 600,000 villages where over 800 million live, are administered by these local self-governments. “The entire country will be covered by broadband within three years and the internet will reach the remotest villages,” Prasad said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who steered the Digital India policy, is personally overseeing the project to ensure deadlines are met, he said. 

The program would rapidly drive internet usage in India and boost the economy. “India is sitting at the cusp of a huge digital revolution,” said Prasad.

“Something big is unfolding,” said Hemant Joshi, partner at advisory firm, Deloitte Haskins & Sells. But the Digital India program is not without challenges, experts said. Finding the financial resources and meeting program deadlines could be foremost among those. India’s structure where governments ruling the country and the states are sometimes led by different political parties could throw up additional complications, Joshi said. There is also the matter of ‘right of way’ when laying thousands of miles of fiber optic cable.
The government plans to hire at least 10 CIOs to oversee the Digital India program in key ministries, and create four other senior positions for dealing with adoption of standards and security aspects.

The government will create an enabling platform that will aid in delivering government services to citizens as well as services in education, healthcare, entertainment and e-commerce. “Public services like land records and caste certificates will be made available online on demand online,” Prasad said. In conjunction with state governments, 20-hour e-literacy training programs in local languages will be conducted in 200,000 community service centers across the country.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/saritharai/2014/09/18/india-wants-to-build-massive-digital-infrastructure-to-cover-800-million-rural-citizens-by-2019/

SAP ACE Award 2014 to DFCCIL

In recognition of India Public Services sector in driving excellence and innovation using information technology, to improve the lives of people and deliver better, more effective government, SAP felicitated 16 Indian enterprises with the SAP Awards for Customer Excellence (ACE) for being at the forefront.

The awards were presented at the eight SAP ACE Award ceremony held at JW Marriot in New Delhi, India. The SAP ACE 2014 for Public Services award categories included Utilities, HR & Payroll, Mobility, Procurement, Finance, Urban local bodies, Innovation and Database computing.

Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Ltd ( DFCCIL ) has been awarded the SAP ACE Award 2014, on 13th August, 2014 as a Special Recognition for leveraging technology in the. This being the first case in public sector wherein DFCCIL leveraged SAP solution for its core process and integrated the same with GIS both in the Corporate Office and in all the 14 CPM offices across both Eastern and Western Corridors. Implementation has been done by HCL. 

The award honoured Indian public services organisations that became the differentiator in improving people’s lives and help urban governments to be best run governments and to help cities contribute to a better run country.

http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31808&articlexml=MEGA-CORP-DIGEST-03092014026006

Smart Cities & Digital India Initiative by GoI

As expected PM Narendra Modi has approved an umbrella programme—Digital India- comprising various projects worth about INR 1 lakh crore ie USD 20 Billion  to transform the country into a digitally-empowered knowledge economy. The Digital India programme includes projects that aim to ensure that government services are available to citizens electronically and people get the benefit of the latest information and communication technology (ICT).

The Digital India programme is a transformed version of the already running National e-Governance Plan. It is in addition to 100 Smart Cities project in the next 5 years. The Mega trend of Smart Cities is set to drive urban development for the next decade and will drive demand for response, storage, multi-energy networks, smart devices, and new business models. In 2025, it is expected we will have around 26 global Smart Cities which will feature five of the eight aforementioned parameters. Around 50 percent of these will be located in North America and Europe.

There are several cities that are focusing on specific aspects that help it run efficiently, such as on their transport, energy and waste management. In example, implementation of smart grids is being pushed heavily for smart energy management. Eight key aspects that define a Smart City are smart governance, smart energy, smart building, smart mobility, smart infrastructure, smart technology, smart healthcare and smart citizen.

Frost & Sullivan research estimates a combined market potential of $1.5 trillion globally for the smart city market in segments of energy, transportation, healthcare, building, infrastructure, and governance. If one compares that to GDP of nations in 2014, it will sit above the GDP of Spain, thus making it the 12 largest GDP in the world. Yet, while the potential is huge, the challenge faced is finding funding and developing the right business model, as many cities in the Western world do not have the finances available to take on some mammoth-sized projects. As such, four main models that will be used, through which companies will engage with city authorities and utilities to tap into this market will be used: Build Own Operate (BOO), Build Operate Transfer (BOT), Build Operate Manage (BOM) and Open Business Model (OBM).

Based on Frost & Sullivan’s study on “Strategic Opportunity Analysis of the Global Smart City Market” published in 2013.Smart Cities & Digital India Initiative by GoI

Can Delhi and its Discoms afford Subsidies?

For a very long time, the supply of power to Delhi was a government undertaking. But after decades of losses, in 2002, the state government decided to reduce its hold and unbundle what was then called the Delhi Vidyut Board. BSES bid to take over the Board and about nine months later, Reliance Power bought over BSES. That left Delhi’s power distribution in the hands of a public private partnership between Reliance and the Delhi government. And the new entity’s biggest challenge was to corporatize the creaking government enterprise.

BSES went for massive technological upgradation including IT infrastructure to control losses. BSES invested  Rs 4,000 crore in augmenting the utility’s infrastructure. 

The IT project helped the organization reduce losses from 60 percent to 20 percent. It also lowered consumer complaint levels by over 89 percent with the grievance closure rate of 91 percent.

That has allowed BSES to turn into a self-sustaining enterprise and save the Delhi Government Rs 15,000 crore.

Business process re-engineering and IT project completely revamped the way the electricity utility functions. It curbed corruption, reduced power losses by over 40 percent—and saved the Delhi government crores. “The amount it saved the Government—by not doling out urban subsidies—played significant role in funding the Commonwealth Games,” says Singh K.B. Singh, VP-I.T, BSES who was responsible for transforming it into a modern and profitable electric utilities co..