Smart Cities and Safe Cities: How Maps & Location Technologies can be a critical enabler.

A lot has been written on smart cities by esteemed individuals and various companies. I thought why not put in a few words as to where does MapmyIndia stand in the entire area of Smart City. So what is the definition or meaning of smart city? Different entities and organizations have different meanings, from our definition it means something where various civic and citizen services are digitized and information is available in a heartbeat.

As most of you know India is a vast and large country. We have many languages, a very old civilization and a very heterogeneous population with a very complicated addressing system. Each part of India has a different method to make / write addresses. Take the case of Mumbai sometimes also known by its old name of Bombay. In Mumbai there is a famous open area known as Shivaji Park. The road in front of it is officially known as Veer Savarkar Marg, but it is also known as VS Marg, it was also known in British times as Cadell Road and it is also known as Mahim galli (as the road narrows out once it moves from Dadar area to Mahim area). Hence depending on the age of the person, different people call the road by different names but it all refers to the same road. This scenario is common across the cities.

What MapmyIndia has done is to put together a comprehensive Indian address directory structure which can used to plan and build smart solutions i.e. when the new or existing cities are re-planned, the correct address, house numbers, road names, building foot prints, footpaths etc will be readily available for the implementation partners. We believe that using the MapmyIndia database, it will be easier to kick-start smart Urban Planning, which will result in smart cities.

Now for Safe cities, we have launched a product called SafeMate and are working on various emergency response solutions, which I will discuss in a follow on post.