The Government of Maharashtra has appointed infrastructure major Larsen & Toubro (L&T) as its partner to convert Nagpur into the first large-scale integrated smart city of the country. It issued the letter of intent to L&T for the purpose recently.
The State Government has adopted an independent model for all the 10 cities—Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Amravati, Solapur, Nashik, Aurangabad, Kalyan-Dombivali, Thane and Pimpri-Chinchwad—within Maharashtra to be developed as smart cities.
The first phase of work would include laying of 1,200 km of optical fibre network, creating 136 city wi-fi hotspots at key locations, setting up 100 digital interactive kiosks and developing city surveillance systems with 3,800 IP-based cameras, the company said in a statement.
Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has already rolled out the project with specifications and a timeline for Nagpur, according to the statement. The state government has also decided to develop the city, which is logistically significant being located in the centre point of India, complete with five hubs from textile centres to defence sectors.
The city has identified a strip of approximately 6 km (from Japanese Garden Square to Orange City Hospital Square) to be developed as a ‘Smart Strip’ with state-of-the-art systems powered by smart ICT interventions like smart transport, solid waste management, smart lighting, etc., which can be leveraged in a phased manner to ultimately cover the entire city.
Beginning with the development of surveillance and intelligent traffic management systems for the Government of Gujarat in Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar and Vadodara and a surveillance and management system of critical infrastructure at the Sabarmati Jail, L&T has since executed the smart city project in Jaipur and is executing India’s largest city surveillance project comprising 6000 cameras across 1500+locations in Mumbai for the Government of Maharashtra. Projects are also underway in Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad, the statement added.
