‘Smart City’ is one of the most popular jargon of the current time. The political parties have mentioned smart city development in their manifesto to influence the voters. A smart city is defined in a variety of ways in various resources but all of them converge to the same gist ultimately: the smart city integrates ICT(Information and Communication Technology) with various physical devices (sensors, receivers, CCTV cameras) that are connected to the network to optimize the efficiency of city operations and services (through a centralized command center) as well as to connect the citizens (through services). A smart city should have well-managed and ICT-enabled traffic and transportation systems, power plants, water supply networks, waste management, law enforcement, information systems, schools, libraries, hospitals, and other community services. Smart City provides its citizens with a clean and sustainable environment, hassle-free services, and hence a decent quality of life.
The foregone local level election and the upcoming provincial and House of Representatives election has a high priority for smart cities from different political parties and candidates. However, their manifesto does not explain how they are going to achieve smart city development. After the local level election and the work done till now by the winning candidates and parties it appears that it is just a slogan to win over voters, but not for real-time implementation. The political leadership should be aware of what smart cities do they mean to provide to the citizens, their characteristics, applications, and implementation roadmap. Otherwise, a smart city would only be an attractive agenda limited in papers to fool the citizens, and the realization of such a concept may take a long period than being promised.
By taking an initiative to build ICT-enabled cities, the LGCDP(Local Government and Community Development Program)of the Government of Nepal has instructed all the local levels to hire IT, officers, locally. However, the uncoordinated recruiting of IT officers between different local bodies has increased the risk of messing with the already existing system, rather than making it effective. While the work at the local level is distributed to each ward rather than being centered at the central office, one ICT officer at each local level proves to be insufficient. Also, the leadership should know the strength and limitations of IT Human resources. The concept of one size fits all in leadership should be clarified from the thought of policymakers. IT human resource is a specialized human resource that ranges from maintenance, development, deployment, networking, management, quality monitoring to auditing. So they should have a clear-cut understanding of the required numbers and expertise. If the government cannot sustain this modality of IT human resources then it is better to bring the private corporate to fill in the gap. Moreover, no clear plan, procedure, and directive have been provided to work in the field. A solid plan and road map should be made to implement the ICT projects properly. Technical human resources should be well trained to work towards specific goals. Furthermore, the budget allocated to each local level is not sufficient. There should be comprehensive monitoring and transparent auditing for the satisfactory performance of the plan by being within the budgeted limit. The government has the primary responsibility in this regard.
Training of the human resources is necessary and crucial before sending them to the local level where they perform their jobs. Technical human resource has to work in different environments, so they should have the capacity to handle diverse situations properly. Analysis of work requirements, work environment, and work structure should be carefully done while working at the local level. This requires a training organization that caters to the need of the IT human resource self and skill development.
For proper mobilization of budget and technical human resources, there should be a strong monitoring and auditing system from the point of visioning. The appointment of ICT experts should be prioritized in organizations such as National Planning Commission as ICT plays a vital role in development. So to support proper planning and road maps regarding the ICT development of Nepal and its projects it has to be prioritized at the time of development planning too. Rules and regulations should be specifically defined before implementation and strong auditing work should be done during and after implementation. Projects without technical audit are like pouring water into sand, it has no significance but only wastage of budget.
Proper planning is the key to making cities smart. According to the Constitution of Nepal-2072, registration of birth, death, marriage, mobility, citizenship, etc. are within the scope of the (local) municipality. Application development for such purposes should be done at the national, or at the very least at province level for the security, uniformity, scalability, integrability, and user-friendliness. If each and every municipality deploy different applications differently for the same purpose and same nature of the task, then it will be very difficult to integrate the records of different municipalities within a district itself. This exploits the full advantages of the use of ICT. Numerous applications for similar tasks increase cost, complexity, and redundancy while decreasing reliability, security, authenticity, etc. The same system should be used by all the municipalities for the same nature of the task so that installation, maintenance, and addition of new features becomes easier. Developing a common system is faster and more cost-effective than developing multiple ones. Online utility bill payment, tax payment, insurance premium payment, and other facilities related to public services are the starting point towards realizing a smart city. Only applications made at the national level or at least province-level help the coordinated transition in this direction. Working on the heterogeneous platforms for different municipalities for same nature of the system is complex, misusing resources and inefficient practice rather than working in a homogeneous platform with distributed environments.
A well-known tradition practiced in many countries is to involve private sectors. A private organization can develop such applications and can be used by the government to connect with the public. Software as a Service(SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS), and Platform as a Service(PaaS) is the best practices used in different countries and their province. These practices will ultimately reduce the cost and resources of government and P2P(Public to Private) modality in service facilitation with monitoring from the government is possible.
Therefore, the trained technical human resources should be sent to the local area so that the work will be systematic and effective. It also helps to solve the local level problem efficiently. At each level viz. local, provincial, and national level; strong and dedicated technical auditing and monitoring system should be implemented. That will help to maintain uniformity and cut off the level of corruption. And last but not the least, proper planning should be done while formulating new ICT and other projects so that they are scalable, uniform, secure, reliable, and user friendly. To arrive at such consequences, the ICT-related projects should be developed at the national or provincial level rather than at each municipality separately. Otherwise, the implementation of an ICT-enabled smart city will give an unpredictable outcome that is unfortunate and will be a wastage of money and time and especially disrespect to the vote of a common man. The starting point of this drawback starts from creating awareness among the people through education from the primary level and to the political leadership through various training and workshops.