Integrated Command and Control Center: Smart Cities Mission | 22 Apr 2022

Why in News?

Recently, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has announced that all 100 smart cities will have Integrated Command and Control Centers (ICCCs), under Smart Cities Mission (SCM).

• These ICCCs are spread across various states that have been developing Smart Cities, with states such as Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat leading in terms of the total number of ICCCs set up.

What is an Integrated Command and Control Centre?

• About:
  • ICCC will act as the “nerve center” for operations management in the city with day-to-day exception handling and disaster management.
  • ICCCs provide smart solutions to the city's municipal corporation and help manage safety and surveillance of the city.
  • The centres comprise video walls for real-time monitoring, emergency response system, operations planning to include critical ones and 24x7 manual maintenance.
  • The centres are being established to enable smart living, smart environment, smart economy, smart governance, smart population and smart mobility.
  • The centre will also provide valuable insights by processing complex data sets at an aggregated level to derive intelligence for improved planning and policymaking.
  • The ICCCs are now also linked to the CCTNS (Crime and Criminal Tracking Networks and Systems) network under the Ministry of Home Affairs.
• Aim:
  • To aggregate information across multiple applications and sensors deployed across the city and provide actionable information with appropriate visualization for decision-makers.

What is the Smart Cities Mission?

• About:
  • It is a Centrally Sponsored Scheme, launched in June 2015 to transform 100 cities to provide the necessary core infrastructure and clean and sustainable environment to enable a decent quality of life to their citizens through the application of "Smart Solutions".
  • The mission aims to meet the aspirations of India’s population living in cities through various urban development projects.
• Features:
  • Among its strategic components is ‘area-based development’, which includes city improvement (retrofitting), city renewal (redevelopment) and city extension (greenfield development), plus a pan-city initiative in which ‘smart solutions’ are applied covering larger parts of the city.
  • Key focus areas of the scheme include construction of walkways, pedestrian crossings, cycling tracks, efficient waste-management systems, integrated traffic management and assessment.
  • The scheme also assesses various indices to track urban development such as the Ease of Living Index, Municipal Performance Index, City GDP framework, Climate Smart Cities assessment framework, etc.
• Status:
  • The period of implementation of SCM has been extended to June 2023.
  • The SCM has so far covered over 140 public-private partnerships, 340 ‘smart roads’, 78 ‘vibrant public places’, 118 ‘smart water’ projects and over 63 solar projects.

What is a Smart City?

• There is no standard definition or template of a smart city. In the context of our country, the six fundamental principles on which the concept of Smart Cities is based are:

Source: IE