Maharashtra govt ties up with Oracle for smart city initiative

Supported by Oracle Cloud, the Government of Maharashtra will establish a Center of Excellence to enable smart cities

The Maharashtra government has partnered with Oracle Corp for the state’s smart city initiative. A memorandum of understanding was signed between the two parties on late Tuesday night.

Under the partnership, a Centre of Excellence (CoE) will be set up in Mumbai, which will serve as a research base to lead the digital transformation for the government’s services. The CoE will help accelerate the state government's smart city programme and modernise its technology solutions, said the California-based company in a statement.

The Mumbai-based CoE will lead the design, development and testing of new cloud-based capabilities to deliver better government-to-citizen (G2C) and government-to-business (G2B) services at low cost, it added.  CM Devendra Fadnavis said, “Cloud computing has changed the landscape of governance. It has the power to enable inclusive growth and to transform the state into a digitally empowered society. Together with Oracle, we want to build a new, efficient, transparent and inclusive system that benefits our people.”

In April, the government of Maharashtra had rolled out an initiative to develop 10 smart cities, in line with the central government’s 100 smart cities initiative.

Both Oracle and the Government of Maharashtra will invest in IT infrastructure, training and skill-set resources as well as management of the CoE. The projects in pipeline for this year include a unified app development for services like driver’s licence renewals or property tax payments, digital platform to deliver smart city services across the state, connected infrastructure across all devices, kiosks and citizens, among others.

“The Cloud Center of Excellence powered by Oracle will play a key role in improving the lives of the people of this state,” said Safra Catz, CEO, Oracle Corporation.

“By moving to the cloud, the government has the opportunity to create a digitally empowered society and a growing knowledge economy. We look forward to making this partnership a success.”