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Interview: Kaushal Raj Sharma, Chairman, Varanasi Smart City

“Geospatial technologies can help cities in data-driven decision-making by helping urban planners and policymakers make informed decisions,” notes Shri Kaushal Raj Sharma, Chairman, Varanasi Smart City, in this interview for AGI’s Jul-Sep 2023 edition on Urban Development.

Varanasi Smart City has implemented GIS-Based solutions to monitor municipal service delivery and improve overall city governance. Can you share some specific examples of how Geospatial technologies have led to more efficient service delivery in the city?

Varanasi Smart City has published a Smart Map of Varanasi, which has broadly employed GIS for digitizing property and assets like Water, Sewers, etc. These layers have been added to the Smart Map Varanasi Portal. Such details have helped the administration immensely, especially for COVID-19 management.

We mapped all resources, including hospitals, doctors, oxygen supply, ambulances, drug stores, and vaccination centers. Patient details were updated regularly on GIS maps, and various trends and patterns were identified, based on which Quarantine Zones were regularly updated. GIS enablement also helped in timely and accurate coordination between different agencies and stakeholders, eventually helping control the pandemic effectively.

Smart Map Varanasi also has several live integrations with multiple sensors, including Cameras, Traffic Signals, Waste Bin Sensors, and Environment Sensors. The Live Integration helps make decisions like the waste bins that are filled turn red color, and those which are more than 80% filled are yellow color. This helps in optimizing waste pick-ups. We created an open Geospatial platform called ‘Kashi Geo-hub’ to provide a common GIS platform to all the stakeholders in the city, including citizens, administrators, civic authorities, businesspeople, startups, academia, and research.

Image Source: Smart Map Varanasi

The Smart City Project in Varanasi has made significant strides in setting up an efficient grievance redressal system. Could you elaborate on how Geospatial technologies have been integrated into this system and its impact on citizen satisfaction?

Crowdsourcing apps on the Kashi Geo-Hub provide a Geospatial-enabled Grievance Management System. The templates have been created to address the three most significant problems of the city – Waste Management, Pollution, and Traffic – with location information. Login dashboards can pinpoint problematic locations in real-time with details.

Image Source: Kashi GeoHub

The city’s focus on cleanliness and solid waste management is commendable. How have advanced technologies contributed to Varanasi’s efforts to become a cleaner, more sustainable city?

Solid waste management has always been a formidable challenge for the city, generating 650 MT of waste daily. When the Kashi Integrated Command and Control Centre project was included in the Smart City Mission initiative, one of the key components was the Integrated Solid Waste Management System for the City. We have digitally linked all assets, starting from waste bins (volume sensor and GPS); collection points (CCTV camera, GPS and smell sensors), SWM vehicles (GPS, Route Tracking, Diesel consumption), SWM staff (biometric-based attendance) to the final disposal and processing Plant (CCTV, Weigh bridges) and integrated all of these together. With real-time data collection and monitoring, solid waste management has seen phenomenal change and improvement in the city.

What were the critical challenges faced by Varanasi Smart City in adopting and deploying Geospatial technologies for various projects?

We encountered multiple challenges in adopting a GIS-based transparent system for city management, including:

• Undertaking a GIS survey of properties and assets was an issue because Old Varanasi is congested, with narrow streets.
• Getting the consensus of people for undertaking the property survey was challenging.
• Integrating administrative data, POI data, Survey Data, and Sensor data on one Platform was complex, which was overcome with collaborative operations between the Smart City, MSI, Vendor, and Esri India teams without any conflict of interest.
• Integrating different live datasets through APIs on a single platform was a challenge. Esri India and subsequent vendors resolved this.
• For deploying the Open data portal on the Cloud, exposing the layers for stakeholders was an experiment because the data security might have been challenged. To overcome this, Esri India came up with a Hybrid Model. All the data resides on on-premise servers and is consumed on the cloud as services only for analytics.

Looking ahead, what are some of the future initiatives and projects in the pipeline that you believe will further enhance the city’s smart infrastructure and citizen services?

Now that we have put the conventional two-dimensional GIS to the best possible use by the city, we want to develop a 3D GIS and digital twin of the city. We are appointing agencies to carry out the 3D GIS mapping using photogrammetry, drone survey, and LIDAR survey. The 3D model of the city, integrated with all attribute databases, will be a powerful tool for all civic agencies to visualize infrastructure entities in 3D view, along with associated street views, for better and quick decision-making. We will further endeavor to develop AI-powered apps for each use case, empowering stakeholders with real-time data and analytics-based decision-making. This will be a game changer in urban planning and management for all times to come.

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