GIFT City begins first phase of its 'smart city' project

Project will see remote management of all the utilities from a single city command

While a smart city project by Microsoft in Surat is on its way, the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City) has already seen the first phase of its own smart city project up and running.

The project is being built with the help of a consortium led by TCS and a joint entity of CISCO and Korean telecom player KT Corp, along with Newgen ITeS Pvt. Ltd and Newgen Holdings Pvt. Ltd.  

According to official sources at GIFT City, the project will see remote management of all the utilities like water, electricity, and traffic data, among others from a single city command and control centre.  

“The GIFT Smart City project is in way an actual implementation of what is being referred to these days as the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT). Two City Command and Control Centre (C4) are being developed in the city which will have a mix of software and hardware platform. The centres will act a single central command and control places for managing utilities remotely,” said a person privy to the development stated.

The first phase of the project is functioning with one of the two centres already up and running while the second is under construction. What’s more, the centres will not only monitor utilities, but also real time monitoring of security and surveillance, traffic management.  Through data analytics and real time monitoring, the smart city project will actively ensure prevention of crimes,” the source added.

Estimated at a project cost of Rs 200 crore, the smart city initiative at GIFT City will also development of a smart city portal for managing citizen services. The portal will not only disseminate information and alerts on utilities, traffic and other news but also act as a single billing destination for citizens in GIFT City. In order to manage data storage and bandwidth at such a massive scale, GIFT City is also in the process of setting up Gujarat’s first tier-4 data centre which will have an initial capacity of 900 racks.

“The capacity in the long term can be upgraded to 2700 racks depending on the requirement of the occupants,” the source further stated. The data centre is expected to be operational by June 2015.  Meanwhile, with several major financial institutions including some of the major stock exchanges mulling setting up of their IT infrastructure and back-end services to GIFT City, the latter is setting up a bandwidth capacity of a whopping 10 gigabytes per second (GBPS).