Cyber Security & Woman Security: Two Key Elements Of Smart City

Leading experts from the industry discussed the challenges in security that has become a major concern in our lives be it health security of our children and family, security on roads or railway network, and security of woman surfacing the cities in India.

A panel discussion at Envision moderated by Vikram Sehgal, IGP, CRPF shed light on these issues cropping up at Smart Cities in India.

Panelists included Anandrao Vishnu Patil, MD, Tamil  Nadu Housing Corporation; Uday Ghiye, GM Infrastructure Division, Nagpur Smart and Sustainable City Development; Ramesh Singh Chauhan, Nodal Officer-PMAY & Smart Cities, Dehradun Municipal Communication; Shafqat Khan Joint Resident Commissioner, Government of Jammu & Kashmir, and Joel Sequira Technology Expert, SUSE, India, highlighted expressed their gritty on the security challenges mentioned above.

While moderating the session Sehgal said, “The need of the hour is to need to access risks and situations thereby enforcing crime control, electronic surveillance. Systems of surveillance will go a long way to fight new challenges.”

“We need to  train our minds with thereby being sensitive to situations, moments around us be it people, any incident that looks suspicious, people need to bring it to the authorities,” added Sehgal.

Patil brought insights into challenges of cybersecurity by saying “In digital India, cyber security one of the most important factors of our life, we all have smartphones and we don’t know who could steal your data. All our services need to be integrated with our apps."

“Businesses, industries all are being targeted by hackers and even terrorists. We are in the state, where providing or creating awareness for technology and interdisciplinary interaction become important. We need to have some policies to take care of all security elements” added Patil.

So what are the innovations that will help to face the challenges of public security and what steps are being taken to get over them by the smart cities?

Listing the initiatives taken by Nagpur to face security challenges Ghiye said, “In a list of 100 cities Nagpur has been ranked number one out of 100 cities. If there are no political parties, people’s participation and bureaucratic determination, can it make a difference to the cities more sustainable?"

“In Nagpur, we have implied city surveillance, city fibre cables, and all smart city interventions, smart traffic lighting, traffic control. We have fully operational command control centres” added Ghiye.

Providing the details of security initiatives taken in Dehradun Chauhan said: “We have the provision of integrated command control centre, smart parking, smart traffic systems and CCTV management systems to control crime. We look forward to being one of the green cities, as we have been in the process to create buffer zones in and around Dehradun.”

Talking about issues of border security and how security problems are being tacked with smart city project Khan said, “We initiated the smart city proposal in 2016. We have as a country need to work on growing the happiness indexes, we have a challenge of militancy and need to make people feel secure and safe, especially women, children and elderly.