The world we live in, always has a liking towards fantasy. We have always attributed unexplained phenomenon through rich imagery and that led to flourishing of tales and folklore within our culture. Atheists may call religion as a result of vivid imagination too. Imagination and intuition has always led us, the mankind to unravel deeper secrets of the universe like Gravity.

If someone claims that City is a living being, how many of us would believe it. Many would out rightly reject such an idea and call it bizarre while some may philosophically attribute city to a body less-self that lives in every city dwellers heart. Though many of us can’t imagine city as a living being, we have no qualms calling a forest within a bustling city as the Lung of the city. Calling main roads as arterial roads is one such thing because main roads are compared to arteries that carry fresh oxygen rich blood to parts of our body. Such an attribute is quite apt because it is the roads which keep a city moving. Can we ever imagine a Chennai without Mount road or Bangalore without an M.G.Road. So such is the importance of roads in a city because of its function.

But there is one organ which is constantly overlooked in our body and is quite under-rated. That is Liver. We get reminded of liver only when there is a serious problem like Hepatitis or Cirrhosis and hence the awareness about liver is quite low. It is one organ which cannot be effectively replaced and is very essential for our survival. Interestingly it is the only organ which can regenerate itself when injured and that makes it resilient.

So why am I talking about liver here. Because liver plays a major role in detoxification of blood and there is one such utility in a city which does that. That is Waste water treatment plants, a public utility which is seldom cared for and which does a major role in increasing the livable standards of any city in this world. This utility is constantly overlooked, sometimes even forgotten from the collective consciousness of the city that 90 % of the people wouldn't know where the sewage from their homes gets treated.

So I call waste water treatment plants (WWTPs) as the liver of the city for it is essential for the very survival of the city itself. With the emergence of extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy or Bay of Bengal cyclones that hit Bangladesh and India, WWTPs play a major role in resilience of the city to such events. In fact many major firms like IBM, Cisco, and Schneider are marketing their products for smarter cities for the very reason to improve the resilience of the city against such events and effective functioning of WWTP infrastructure is enlisted as one of the prime objective in all.

So what is meant by Smart management of a city? Imagine a room which is filled with dashboards that point to the every activity of the city just like an ICU where the patients vitals on shown on the screen. Smart management of the cities are increasingly going to depend on the data that we are going to harvest from every utility of the city say water supply and gas pipelines , electric lines , roads, storm water management , fresh water reservoir, sensors pointing to ambient air quality and so on. So that is the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) where data from various sensors are collected and analyzed to take remedial actions and the effect of such actions constitute the basis of smart city management.