Saving time and money, this future-focussed centre will help authorities monitor the status of various smart civic amenities in real-time!

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Improving the state of governance in our cities is something that we can no longer afford to delay. In a bid to address these concerns, the Centre embarked on its Smart City Mission (SCM) in 2015.

Progress has been slow, but on Tuesday, the Madhya Pradesh government potentially took the first few steps towards fulfilling the mandate set by the SCM.

In Bhopal, the government launched India’s first Integrated Control and Command Centre (ICCC), and it is for all the seven smart cities in Madhya Pradesh—Bhopal, Indore, Ujjain, Gwalior, Jabalpur, Satna, and Sagar. The ICCC is located at the Bhopal Smart City Development Corporation Ltd. (BSCDCL) facility in the Berkheda area.

Developed by the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), an American multinational IT giant, the ICCC is a cloud-based Universal Internet of Things (UIoT) platform, which will enable authorities to monitor the status of various civic utilities in real time, using GPS sensors.

These utilities include traffic cameras, solid waste management units, meteorological department centres, dial 100 police vehicles, 108 ambulance services, street lights, water supply centres, and public buses, among others.

“ICCC will integrate a multitude of citizens’ services applications and sensors running across selected cities of Madhya Pradesh,” Som Satsangi, the Managing Director of HPE (India) told NDTV. “ICCC enables the government to remotely manage and control various citizen services like smart lighting, smart parking, smart traffic and transport, waste management, water supply etc. through a single platform, would save time and money of the government by providing an interface to the citizens.”

Also Read: How Indore Became Garbage-Free and Beat Every Other City to It

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Based on this direct interface with citizens and real-time data this platform provides, authorities can make better-informed decisions and take pro-active measures. “This system would control street lights, parking lights, parking, traffic (including violations and congestions), waste management, water supply etc. through sensors,” he added.

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“For example, dump trucks in Bhopal travel about 22,000 km every day to collect garbage. Some of the trucks are overfilled and sometimes a part of garbage falls on streets. But if we monitor the garbage bins across the city through sensors, it will help in notifying the centre about those bins which are 70-80% full, so that trucks can go and collect garbage from those particular dumps instead of them travelling across the whole city,” he told NDTV.

(Edited by Gayatri Mishra)

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