Smartness...without the Stutter - what India's Smart Cities Mission could be about

An obsession with "implementation" can create problems not just for planning (which is still struggling to open its parachute after being jettisoned), but also for urban missions of the government whose performance should not and probably cannot be measured quantitatively.

For example, one should not attempt to either shape or evaluate the Smart Cities Mission using metrics that one could use for AMRUT, PMAY or the Swachh Bharat Mission.

If one attempts to measure "intelligence" using metrics like the number of integrated command and control centres made, or the ridiculously high figure of lakhs or crores spent on the 5858 smart city projects or that other wholly irrelevant variable - numbers of place-making projects implemented - then one may totally lose ones way and end up with a complete hotch-potch of things where anything and everything could be described as a smart city.

Perhaps, this is exactly what made the present minister, former seasoned diplomat and articulate speaker, appear rather at a loss for words while describing the achievements of the Smart Cities Mission at the National Urban Planning Conclave in July this year. You can listen to him here.

The fact that while talking about the command and control centres he could only mention their role as war rooms during covid says a lot about the lack of clarity regarding one of the most significant components of the Smart Cities Mission. Yet, it is precisely the points that he mentioned and the manner in which he mentioned that reveal what is fundamentally problematic in the conceptualisation of the Smart Cities Mission.

Not a separate mission...but the brain linking all missions

To see the Smart Cities Mission as a distinct mission itself seems to be an erroneous approach. Instead of trying to create a green-field "smart city" or develop parts within the city as area based development zones or initiate a random traffic signaling project here or a place making project there, the smart cities mission should be about being the "brain" that links, coordinates and charts out the path for all the various urban missions and activities being undertaken in a particular city. It should be the "intelligence" that guides the actions of all the on-going and future missions. 

Seen in this way, there would be no need to justify the achievements of the mission by quoting figures for numbers of smart parks developed or the expenditure incurred in the construction a super-duper integrated command and control centre building.

Unfortunately, the work of being the brain is precisely what the smart cities mission has not been able to do. In order to do that one needs the freedom to adopt a way of thinking that focuses on how things are being implemented rather than explicitly focus on what is being implemented -- on effectiveness and functionality rather than appearing cool and spewing buzzwords.

One has to somehow initiate a "capacity building" programme for the very politicians, government officials and private sector consultants who are engaged with the smart cities mission....for, I hate to say it, but they really don't seem to have a clue when it comes to the science of creating intelligent systems capable of tackling complexity and uncertainty.

The fact that the mission is often under vigorous criticism from a bunch of even more clueless social and political scientists, journalists and activists is another reason for its inability to correct its course. This crowd is even more difficult to handle because its members are not only comfortably ignorant of the fact that they are completely ignorant but also pretty smug in their confidence that their critique is spot on.

What Smart systems are like

In my early days of exploring the smart cities mission I often came across this trivia that the concept of smart cities has its roots in some products and systems developed by the IBM company. 

Well, if that is so, then how do we explain the following lines written in 1965 ?

"Planning is not centrally concerned with the design of the artefacts, but with a continuing process that begins with the identification of social goals and the attempt to realise these through the guidance of change in the environment. At all times the system will be monitoring to show the effects of recent decisions and how these relate to the course being steered. This process may be compared to that encountered in the control mechanisms of living organisms, part of the subject matter of cybernetics."

- J.B. Mcloughlin

 

The highlighted line in the passage is precisely the task that the integrated command and control centres should be performing. And as Mcloughlin righly points out, the roots of such a continuous and dynamic style of planning (which strongly resembles a Smart City approach) lie in the fields of cybernetics and operations research.

How can a system develop a kind of "intelligence" where it can take decisions and optimise its course by continuously receiving feedback from a variety of sensors. The principle of automatic control is built into such an approach. At its most basic it could be something as simple and effective as a water tank with a floating valve stopper that stops the flow of water into to the tank when the water reaches a certain level and then resumes it again when it falls below that level. 

And at a large and advanced level it could be something like this -

This is a diagram of an interconnected power generating system. The components comprising the system and shown in the diagram were described by the author A.A. Voronov as follows -

"A few hydroelectric stations (A) and the thermal stations (B) tied into a ring network operating on a common constant load (C) under direct digital control from a control room (D) common for all the utilities."

- A.A. Voronov, "Specific Features Involved in the Development of Large Automatic Control Systems"

The component (D) highlighted by me in the line above and shown as "Supervising Computer" in the diagram IS an Integrated Command and Control Centre.

It is not about what kind of building it is located in, but the function that it performs that is important.

And what is that function ? Voronov explains it as follows -

"Depending on weather conditions the amount of water collected and stored in the station reservoirs can vary significantly. At a low water level the hydroelectric stations should cut their daily discharge from the reservoirs so as to conserve the accumulated water. To compensate the reduced capacity of the water stations the network has to increase the amount of fuel burnt in the thermal units, which implies increased requirements for railway transportation delivering this fuel. Conversely, with high water levels in the reservoirs, the requirements for railway transportation are reduced accordingly.

The algorithm computing these optimal powers is implemented on the supervising computer of the system. From the general incoming information visualised on the display the operator may adjust the algorithm to take into account the changing external conditions of the system such as fuel characteristics, flooding terms, and so on."

 

The network described above coordinates varying hydrological conditions; power generation and freight transportation through necessary algorithms working through the integrated command and control centre.

Does anything more need to said to explain what a smart and intelligent system should be doing ? 

And by the way, this example is from a book published 40 years ago !

When one starts to understand what such systems are really about and for how long they have been around then one can start going a little deeper than be preoccupied with scientifically profound concerns such as terminators enslaving humanity. 

Consider the following observation by the remarkable Soviet mathematician Elena S. Wentzel -

"Even with totally automatic systems of control which seem to make decisions with no human interference, the judgement of a human is always present in the form of the algorithm employed by the system. 

The functions of the human are not taken up by a machine, rather, they shift from a basic level to a more intelligent level. To add more weight to the argument, some automatic control systems are developed so that the human may actively interact to aid the process of control."

- Elena S. Wentzel, "Operations Research: A Methodological Approach"

And by the way, the above lines are from a book published 43 years ago !

As I have discussed earlier, the tremendous increase in the processing power of computers, the growth of GNU/Linux and the free and open-source software (FOSS) movement and the availability of open data allow us to develop such systems on our own laptops and desktops. All it requires is the courage and the willingness to learn things that are important for our work but are, as yet, unfamiliar to us. 

It is always more liberating to learn and do, than having to pretend and defend.

In the forthcoming blogs we will continue to look at how such systems can be developed to tackle complex real world problems, using the resources that are readily available to us.

Split City - have our urban missions caused multiple personality disorder in our cities ?

I had written in an earlier blog how the urban development process in India has overcome the "plan-was-good-but-implementation-was-poor" impasse by abandoning planning itself. And by planning I am referring not to the oft encountered terms such as "governance", "resilience", "sustainability" etc. etc. which end up meaning pretty much everything (and therefore - nothing), but the art and science of making sense of the future in order to better prepare for it. 

As Brian G. Field and Bryan D. MacGregor wrote:

"Planning is a process of analysis and action which is necessarily about the future. It involves intervention to manipulate procedures or activities in order to achieve goals. Forecasting is crucial to such a process." 

- 'Forecasting Techniques for Urban and Regional Planning'

Our political leaders and government officials love to mention in public speeches how the length of roads and pipes built in the country could well nigh be measuring tapes for the solar system and the number of dwelling units built under our housing programs could house the population of certain developed countries six times over (that is, provided they agree to stay in homes of the size of 25 to 30 square meters. I have been involved in building scores of these...I have some idea).

But the mere reaching of astronomical numbers and sizes is not a measure of the functionality of the amenities created.

I wrote in the blog how new affordable housing units ended up getting constructed under an earlier central government scheme right next to a slum which was being upgraded under a current state government scheme.

Presumably, the affordable housing scheme (intended to house the residents of the slum), and the slum upgrading scheme (intended to keep the slum residents in their existing settlement) were not exactly on talking terms. The result was a creation of new housing units for households that didn't need them anymore.

The phenomenon is commonly described by concerned folk as the challenge of "working in silos". The solution prescribed is often a healthy dose of the magic medicine called "convergence".

But the problem is a bit more complex than remaining and operating in silos. It seems to be one of full blown Dissociative Identity Disorder (or split personality disorder).

Split City Syndrome

Working in silos would suggest that a particular unit dealing with a project or its part is not communicating adequately with other units dealing with related projects or other parts of the same project.

However, a multiple personality syndrome would be when the same unit acts like totally different entities when dealing with separate parts of the same project or with different but inter-related projects. For example, when working with Swachh Bharat Mission the same planning office may be oblivious of the fact that Pradhaan PMAY houses contain toilets and then while working with PMAY, it may forget that toilets for the targeted households may already have been constructed under SBM. This transition may happen seamlessly over the hours of the same working day.

This is not mere speculation. This is exactly what's going on in the field, in the cities and towns of India (comfortably far away from the large halls of Vigyan Bhawan where the National Urban Planning Conclave was recently held).

While attempting to saturate each and every slum settlement of a state with individual household level toilets, the alarm suddenly rings that the households that have applied for PMAY funding for benficiary led house construction (BLC) should be factored in. 

That is certainly a wise thing to do, except that "factoring it in" effectively translates into counting the houses that have applied for PMAY BLC funding as "toilets that have already been constructed."

When thinking about toilets, the SBM personality dominates. Like a hammer seeing everything as a nail, that personality trait sees everything as a toilet. It eliminates all other rooms in a BLC house and sees only the toilet. It cares not if the house has been built or not. Then when the time comes to look at what is going on with the PMAY BLC house construction, all hell breaks loose, because it is realised that the construction has not even started as funds from the centre have not yet been released. When the PMAY personality trait dominates, then the SBM trait dissolves -- only the ghosts of toilets in yet-to-be-built houses populate the spreadsheets of SBM. 

Convergence is desirable...but not at the top 

The attempt to use the concept of "convergence" to link and coordinate the various mission verticals is a good idea. Overcoming the analysis-paralysis of long drawn planning exercises was necessary. If planning lags behind reality by an ever increasing margin then such planning is useless. As Otto Koenisberger had remarked already in the 1960s, after his experience with plan making in Karachi, that by the time the plan was prepared it was already out of date.

However, an implementation frenzy of the kind we are seeing in our cities, where the various mission verticals try to maximise their own outputs without paying any heed to how other missions are intertwined with it, is not desirable either. 

Advances in technology and computing make it possible to have dynamic, real-time systems that can coordinate the functioning of inter-connected mission verticals. The so called "convergence" of these missions is not supposed to happen at a higher level of decision-making - for example, an over-arching department of planning and convergence or in the office of a senior IAS officer who is in-charge of multiple mission streams.

It is supposed to happen throughout the network of the mission streams and through the rank-and-file of the organisational system that is in-charge of the implementation. 

More on that in forthcoming blogs...

Open Data...or Open Disdain ? Cognitive dissonance and Urban India's Open (GIGO) Portals

The challenge of cognitive dissonance

It seems that the biggest challenge facing the urban development sector today is a severe case of cognitive dissonance. While at one time people lamented the mis-match between "planning" and "implementation", now it seems to be a far deeper malaise of people simply not registering the difference between what they are saying and what they are doing.

To be honest, I always found the "planning-is-ok-but-implementation-is-poor" thingy to be utterly ludicrous and misleading. Even a little child would know that making a time-table and following it are two different things. There was no need for professional adults to have gone on parroting this truism and diverting attention from the real technical challenges of effective plan making and execution.

But this recent cognitive dissonance is dead-on devastating in its ability to nurture a collective dumbness among urban sector officials and professionals and then rewarding those who manage to dumb down at exponential rates.

A prime example of this phenomenon is the recent trumpeting of the online Open Data portals by the urban sector.

Have you even visited your own "Open Data" portals ?

In Satyajit Ray's classic film "Jana Aranya", the character played by Utpal Dutt asks a banana seller if he had ever himself tasted the bananas that he sells. 

Better hear the voice of the great Utpal Dutt yourself, and keep the tone in your mind -

We can then ask the officials and consultants of India's various urban missions in the same tone, if they have ever visited their own "open data" portals. 

A few months ago, at a conference on the smart cities mission, a senior official of the mission said that he was very glad that so much data was now available freely to the public through open data platforms such as the Open Government Data (OGD) platform , the Indian Urban Data Exchange (IUDX) platform etc. 

One wonders how he could say something like that at a public forum and how none of the die-hard supporters and critics of the mission in the audience had no questions regarding such a statement.

Open data and my neighbour's laundry list

I have made multiple visits to both the above platforms and downloaded various data files. Never have I ever found anything with any more usefulness or relevance to my work than ... let's say....my neighbour's laundry list. It seems as if the professionals tasked with uploading data to these portals found every scrap of excel spreadsheet lying around in their respective offices and dumped them in these digital bins. May be they are rewarded for the sheer number of files that they upload rather than what those files contain.

It is also amusing to discover that individuals who talk passionately about these platforms have never visited them or have downloaded any data from them. A large part of the problem is also the unfamiliarity with the basic standards of data storing and a lack of clarity regarding the tasks that the data should be used for.

The fact that this useless data is available in a range of file types such as csv, json, ods etc further compounds the irony of the situation.

And of course, let's not forget that entering the website and accessing the data are not always the same thing. 

Often you will encounter this at some point -

Or this -

Strangely, when I had checked the portal sometime back, many of the "private" buttons were "open" and coloured a welcoming green. Of course in the name of smart traffic signal data they often contained something as amazing as column containing names of certain squares (all the rest is left to the Sherlock Holmsian powers of imagination and deduction on the part of the website visitor).

Consider the following csv (comma separated value) file available on the OGD portal -

This is all the information that this downloaded csv file contains. The file contains no metadata (which means there is no data on the data itself) such as - when was it uploaded, who uploaded it, which period is represented in the data, what do the fields mean (does "Nos. of IHHL" mean number of individual household toilets under construction or already constructed or targeted ?), does the data correspond to the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) or some other project...and, how on earth does a person not dealing daily with Indian development lingo know what "IHHL" stands for in the first place ??...etc. etc. etc.

The incompleteness of the data further renders it useless. Even if we were to assume that the data shows how many toilets have been constructed, what is the use of that if not compared against the total toilets that were supposed to be constructed ? Even if that data were available in another file on the portal, they would not be comparable due to the lack of metadata.

The hard fact regarding any data management process is that any data that does not contain meta-data is garbage data. And considering the inevitable thing that happens when garbage data is fed into any analytical or decision-making system (Garbage In - Garbage Out....aka GIGO)....none of this data should be used by anyone actually trying to do something useful.

Genuine open data portals

It is normal for the "defenders" of these portals to wax apologetic when confronted with these issues with predictable statements such as - "Yes...but it also contains things which are useful...with time it will improve...it takes time to build something like this" etc etc. 

There is no need for all that. Just a quick visit to any of the following would give one a clear idea on what serious open data portals should be like.

Bhuvan portal of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)+National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC)

Automatic Weather Station portal of the Indian Meteorological Department. 

USGS EarthExplorer of the United States Geological Survey.

AND not to forget the wonderful....

Census of India.

At the end it all boils down to this - if you have something serious to do and you know what you are talking about, your data won't have to be a pile of BS...open or not.