2020 Harvard India Conference – Smart Cities in India

Opening the discussion, Alok Singh, director, Dell Technologies, highlighted this as the new deal of the 21st century drawing a parallel with the investment in infrastructure projects in the US to come out of the Great Depression. The scale of urbanization in India requires one city of the size of Chicago to be built every year for the next 10 years to make way for the largest human migration ever as 600 Million people are expected to move from rural India to cities. With this comment, Dr. Mukhesh Aghi, President and Chief Executive Officer of USISPF set the ball rolling for this discussion. He further emphasized the need of a robust public-private-partnership for funding all Smart Cities projects following the success path of Singapore. Prof John Macomber, Sr Lecturer at Harvard Business School whose research focuses on the future of the cities described why different solutions are required for the developing countries.

Take a listen (quality of the video not great, so not much to look at) on the comments made by the experts with first hands experience as advisors to the government of India for the smart cities mission or as leading partners in the execution side. The leaders explain how India with it’s constraint, is going about rolling out smart interventions to make cities more liveable and results have already visible.