Chinese tech major keen to partner 'Smart City' project

A Chinese technology major today expressed desire to collaborate with India in its ambitious 'Smart City' project and a top official of the company will be visiting the country next week to take forward the idea.
"We want to partner with India in building its smart cities, as envisioned by the new government. We are a leading firm in hardware and India is good in software and I think our association will be wonderful," Vice-President, Inspur Group, Zhang Dong told PTI today.
He said that a dialogue has already been initiated with the Indian government in this regard.
"Our (Inspur) president visited India earlier and last week the Indian Ambassador in China visited us. I will be visiting India next week for month-and-a-half. The idea would be to meet officials and explore the possibilities of a collaboration," Zhang said.

He was speaking to PTI on the sidelines of a visit by the 'Indian Youth Delegation to China 2014' at the company's headquarters here in the capital of Shandong Province in eastern China, about 440 km from Beijing.
The multi-national company, which has played a pioneering role in taking the country from the "mainframe to the cloud computing era", says China's experience of building its own smart cities "would come in handy for India".

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping meeting in India earlier has already signified the relationship and the importance of the Sino-India ties. And, given the historical and cultural similarities and connections of the two countries, this association is something we look forward to," Zhang said.

Inspur Group, a leader in making of technology servers in China, is also building the 'Smart City' information architecture for the government.
Guangzhou, a 'smart city' in China, and Ahmedabad in India were declared as 'sister cities' during Xi's visit and Zhang said the "momentum can be taken further".
"China has several smart cities like Guangzhou, and we want to invest our expertise in this ambitious programme," he said.