French firms take initiative to develop Smart Cities in India

October 20, 2016

An Indo-French workshop at Chandigarh

With the Smart Cities mission well underway, get ready for a slice of Paris in India! Three cities – Chandigarh, Puducherry and Nagpur – have attracted interest from the French who have proposed to develop them fully into smart cities. Strong on aesthetics as well as energy conservation, the French model of development also focuses on the user at the center of all development.

French consul general to India Yves Perrin says, “My concept of smart cities is based on at least four pillars, namely, energy, transport, water and waste management. These basic things have to be implemented first. Only then can cities be made smart.” ‘Smartness’ is everything that is required to make you comfortable in your daily life, adds Perrin.

One of the French companies already very well-entrenched here is Egis India, the Indian arm of the French engineering major Egis Group. The company has won a contract to develop Bhubaneswar and has also bid for Chandigarh. Tenders for Puducherry and Nagpur are yet to be issued by the two town authorities. However, Egis has separately successfully bid for the Nagpur metro and is already working on the project. “We can provide a metro but if one needs to stand in long queues, this is not fully facilitating,” points out Ashish Tandon, MD, Egis India. “If we only facilitate your commute from one place to another, and that too not very comfortably, and with no last-mile connectivity, then what is the point? It should be such that you are able to very conveniently reach the metro station and also conveniently be able to go where you want when you get out at the other end. Therefore, we have planned bicycles and e-rickshaws for Bhubaneswar. We may even do a light rail transit (LRT). The focus is on inter-modal transport,” says Tandon. (LRT is a series of localised automated guide-way transit systems acting as feeder services to the heavy rail MRT (mass rapid transit)).

Egis has done a lot of work in Paris and the Greater Paris area and one can expect “a lot of commonality between the cities we have done in France and what we will do here,” says Tandon. He adds, “Moreover, we do predictive modeling since we are looking at planning ahead for the next 20 years.”

Another area of strength for France is the digital domain where the country emerged as one of the early spenders globally. “This is an area that comes naturally to them and therefore, you may find a very strong digital infrastructure in whichever city the French associate themselves with. In the areas of traffic automation, car scanners for parking, road safety technologies, etc., you may find very high-tech solutions. Information technology will be the backbone to collate all kinds of data to make life easier for citizens,” says Pratap Padode, Founder and MD, Smart Cities Council India.

He adds that over 30 countries have evinced interest to partner with India for the Smart Cities mission and are interested in picking up business in India. And since there is more than Rs 3 lakh crore that is going to be spent on the mission by the government, obviously, everybody would like to have a slice of this pie. One of the ways to garner a slice, is to finance the master plan for the cities, like France has proposed for Chandigarh, Puducherry and Nagpur and the US for Visakhapatnam. Specifications are then evolved for creating a smart city with inputs from world-class experts and consultants mostly from that country that also enable their own companies to bid for the bigger set of orders for execution and implementation, explains Padode. “It’s a win-win situation because for India, in a sense, we are getting our cities designed for 20-30 years into the future for free. And for France or for any other country, they are able to get business for their companies,” Padode adds.

Till date, two memorandums have been signed, one of them with the US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) to develop Visakhapatnam, Allahabad and Ajmer, and the other with Agence Francaise de Developpement (AFD). The MoU with AFD is independent of the Smart Cities mission but not unrelated to it and a line of credit will be used to develop Nagpur, Chandigarh and Oulgaret (Puducherry).

Chandigarh already has a French connection, having been planned by noted French architect Le Corbusier. Puducherry has been a former French enclave. And in Nagpur, the French are also interested in the metro project as well as in upcoming industries in the vicinity.

Under the MoU for a period of three years, the technical cooperation programme will make available to Puducherry a pool of French experts from the public sector (French municipalities, local public companies, agencies for urban planning), complemented by experts from the private sector. The experts will be chosen from domains such as sustainable urban development, integrated development and urban planning, urban transport, water and waste management, architecture and heritage, renewable energy and energy efficiency.

“In a larger context, the pool of experts could rotate like a roster between the three Indian cities to which French technical assistance will be provided,” the agreement states. They would essentially focus on areas such as strengthening the strategy and management of urban services, covering integrated development and urban planning, urban transport, water supply, sanitation, waste management, architecture and heritage, renewable energy and energy efficiency.
French firms like Alstom, Dassault, Egis, Lumiplan, RATP Transdev and Schneider are interested in the Smart Cities Mission. High-profile visits have been ongoing for over a year to Puducherry, Nagpur and Chandigarh.