Smart-Cities for India: Why not Open-Source Villages?
This concept paper examines the bases for the 100 smart-cities proposed in India—a partial solution is the adoption of leapfrogging technologies. It argues instead for the idea of smart-villages, like the PURA model proposed by Abdul Kalam, which could bu
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Abstract This concept paper examines the bases for the 100 smart-cities proposed in India—a partial solution is the adoption of leapfrogging technologies. It argues instead for the idea of smart-villages, like the PURA model proposed by Abdul Kalam, which could build up rural areas and mitigate migration. Better would be a scheme of open-source architecture/settlements supported by ICT, developable for rural areas; further, their inherent knowledge needs to be captured, preserved and adapted to today’s context.
Keywords Smart-cities Leapfrogging Open-source Traditional knowledge
E-governance
Smart-villages
1 Introduction Humankind is being thrust headlong into the 21st century, often without options. In parts of the world, human-induced changes of urbanisation, pollution, war, or effects of climate change—deforestation and drought, affect people. Modern technology has come as both a boon and a bane, even in the remotest parts of the world. This is partly because of a significant rise in the global population, 7.5 times in the last 200 years—from an estimated population of a billion in 1804 to 7.43 billion today (08/2016). Much of this followed the Industrial Revolution; new developments in science, medicine and technology gave increased life-spans, falling infant-mortality rates, lesser deaths from hunger, disease and similar. India’s 2016 population stands at 1.329 billion with a life expectancy at birth of 68 years, and an infant mortality rate under age five of 47.7 deaths per thousand [1]. Technology has been a global component in making humankind a part of the process disturbing the planet, from what a few centuries ago was at the mercy of
P. Varghese (&) IntelliARCH, Irinjalakuda, India e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 A. Chakrabarti and D. Chakrabarti (eds.), Research into Design for Communities, Volume 2, Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies 66, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-3521-0_7
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Nature; today, the human-made world affecting the processes of Nature itself, sufficient to cause an imbalance. The paper examines how administrative decision-making in the country seems to be without consideration of many aspects, which could affect a section of the population, mainly in the rural areas. Often decisions taken are based on economic and political considerations, but the effects spin off into many other sectors. The justification for developing smart-cities based on urban considerations seems biased against those in rural areas. Instead, the paper proposes an equitable distribution of resources which benefit more of the population. It proposes diverse processes, based on an open-source system of knowledge sharing, taken from models in the information and communications technologies (ICT) field.
2 Technological Leapfrogging The late physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”.
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The Indian Scenario
An advantage of advancing technologies is that on
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