 We commence the second two panels of today's conference assessing the state of U.S.-India relations, economic relations. We're going to take a look first at the concept of smart cities. Now, before jumping into it, I know we've got a number of folks that just joined after the luncheon session here, and I expect it's going to continue to grow as we head towards the Honorable Finance Minister's speech at the end of the day. Very excited to be the first organization to host him on his first trip since taking over that role. But, you know, I just wanted to take the time again to note the great cooperation that we had leading up to this point with both the Wadwani Foundation, which I share a parentage, and the Ananta Aspen Center from New Delhi in organizing this program, and also it couldn't have been possible without the financial support from a few groups that came forward, Corning, Prudential, Oracle, Tata, and Taj. So if you see folks from those companies milling around, please do say thanks for the lunch and thanks for having some of the best hotels in the world. So, yeah. So after the Modi government gets elected, after they take office, smart cities. It's a concept that existed beforehand, but they added a lot of new energy to it. Certainly it wasn't talked about that I saw anyways in quite that context in India. The announcement that they want to develop a hundred smart cities. And I think at that time, too, the US government was so interested in eager and trying to restart relations, which had been rock bottom a year ago, that when we saw these big grand initiatives get announced, we had to think, what can we do to support that? Well, that kind of gets back to two other questions. What the heck is a smart city, and who pays for it? I'm sure there's a lot of other great questions, too, but you know, these are some of the things. What is a smart city? A lot of different definitions out there. A lot of ideas on how to finance it, what might work, might not. The US government has announced that three smart cities in India we're going to partner with. Allahabad, Ajmir and Vizag. So there's three that we've actually officially voiced our support for actually helping develop. A few announcements related to that, but I think most of the work has yet to be done. So I thought, what a terrific idea to bring together some of the most, some of the smartest and most creative people that I've been able to see in the horizon, thinking about looking at smart cities and have a conversation about what constitutes one, what does not constitute a smart city, and what role might the US be able to play, both from the corporate side and from the government side. So four terrific speakers here to cover this topic today. Starting on my right and your left, Akhilesh Talotya, who joins us all the way from Mumbai. We've actually got, I think, the most traveled panel here today. I'll still count you, South Africa, just to add to the mileage on this. Coming from Mumbai leads thematic research and market strategy reports on Indian equity markets for Kotak. Also noted author with his first book just came out called The Making of India. And I'd devour all the stuff, since we first met in Mumbai a few months ago, everything that he puts out. Tying together these big changes that are happening in India with what it means for investors. And a good day, I hope that I can play that role somewhat here from Washington. So Catherine McKellop Thompson from Bechtel, so responsible for integration of sustainability into strategy proposals and projects. Of course, Bechtel is a hand in many of the greatest infrastructure projects around the world. Denise Lee, when I first started looking around at what is a smart city, a lot of your work and material was some of the first stuff that popped up when I did that. So when we decided to add this, I reached out to my good friend Jim Brady, who's part of our advisory board here at the foundation and said, who is this Denise? I'd love to meet her. But she's in South Africa, but she volunteered to move to the United States in order to make this happen. So Denise, great to have you here as well. Only a partial joke on that. You'll notice her Boston accent. And Suparno Banerjee, who joins us from Hewlett Packard. Suparno, I just met for the first time recently and I just couldn't believe we'd never crossed paths because we go to the same barber. If I was sharing the next panel, Rustam from Corning, we get the same joke too. He's a member of the office of the CEO and is responsible for growth in HP's public sector business. And prior to assuming this role, Suparno was vice president for strategy for HP's work enterprise group in Asia Pacific in Japan. So that's the order of the panelists as well. So let me turn it over first to Akhilesh. And you can speak from here or at the lectern, whichever you prefer. I'll just head out there. Great. Great. Thank you, Rick. And thank you, everybody. This is, I hope I'll wake you up from your luncheon session. When Rick first reached out to me and said that we want to discuss the smart cities in India, my first question to him was to even know what smart cities is. And I think that is, at least when I come in here, one of the things that I want to take away is to get a sense of what India would want to do and take learnings away from here in terms of what India can do in respect of developing its smart cities in India. I think it's interesting that the US has already come ahead and identified three cities which want to become smart. So let's see how things go ahead from here. What I wanted to do to set, in some sense, the tone for the panel was to give you a broad sense of where things stand with respect to organization in India, what, how cities in some sense are organized in India, and what are the challenges and opportunities that could open up, what are the sort of numbers that we're looking at in terms of funding, et cetera, and how things could go ahead. A quick point about organization is that in the reason people come into cities across the world and especially through in India is that cities do provide a much better economic opportunity than what rural countryside typically ends up providing. In the earlier panel there was a discussion about how agriculture has been growing at about 2% and how people want to potentially be a part of the growth story in India, and cities are in some sense a very logical place to come to in terms of the growth that would potentially come in here. I think one of the key advantages of coming to the city is that cities are in a much better position to provide public utility, something that becomes very difficult to provide in part rural India. Rural India or Indian villages, number 600,000 to provide the sort of facilities that are required to be, to reach out to such a large number of places, it just becomes a big challenge. A city you can derive a lot of scale benefits and I think that is in some sense the key theme that we will see as we go ahead when we talk about the smart city story. For me when I think about the sort of public utilities that cities could provide much better, I look at what in Indian politics has been a slogan about Bijli Sarakpani, which is power, water and roads, and I add to that Shikshasvastia and Suraksha, which is education, health and security in general. So to that extent these six services form the bedrock of why people would move into a city after having figured out that there is a much better economic model to move into cities, much better jobs, etc. that are potentially possible. And I think as we talk about where smartness will come in, I think the smartness will potentially come in how we deliver some of these goods to people in urban cities. The order of magnitude of urbanization in India is actually somewhat disappointing for observers. If we go back all the way back to 1971, India was about 20% urbanized, if we go back to our census numbers then, which is broadly the number for China in 1971. Since then, the 2011 census tells us that we have moved to about 31% urbanization. So that's about 12 percentage points increase in urbanization over the last 40 years. In the meanwhile, China's moved from about 20 to about 51% in the same 40 year time frame. I think one of the key reasons why urbanization takes place is simply because you require new places, new cities where you would do a lot more manufacturing, you would do a lot more industrial work. India has quickly moved from being an agriculture economy to becoming a services dominated economy. And in a services dominated economy, it just makes sense to move to cities which are already thriving, which are already big, rather than go out to newer cities. And hence, in some sense, the story of India's urbanization has not been a story of creating new cities. It's been a story of mega policies becoming much larger. So you have a Delhi NCR region which expands out into four or five older cities which merge into one, Bombay becoming a much larger city taking into account Navi Mumbai, Thane areas, Chennai expanding out, Bangalore expanding out. But you would rarely hear of a new big city coming up in India. And I think that manifests itself in saying that the top eight to 10 cities would account for almost 25% of India's urban population. This number is very, very different across China or the US where a much smaller proportion of people would live in such mega policies. But there will be a large number of cities in the one to five million population range. And that is what I call the missing middle. In India you have very few cities which are in that range. You either have a large number of very, very small towns and villages which are morphing into becoming small cities or hubs where a lot of villages would congregate or you would have mega policies. So to that extent, I think the way urbanization is spanning out in India is that you focus a lot more on the top eight to 10 cities. That's where bulk of your urban population would be. And there is a large chunk of smaller places which are now beginning to get slightly more densely populated. While I did mention that India's urbanization rate is about 31%, if you go by government definitions or census definitions of how things stand, we have a very curious way in which we define urbanization in India. And one of the aspects or one of the rules of defining urbanization is that in a place for a place to be called urban, 75% of the people living there or men living there need to work outside of agriculture. Now, given the fact that more than half of India is indeed employed in agriculture, that is a very stringent benchmark that we have said for ourselves and which is where we end up undercounting urbanization significantly. If you were to do away with this restriction and look at just the fact that people living densely together would be an urban area, the official definition would then in some sense move from a 31% urbanization to close at about 49% of urbanization. So what you do have is a lot of places where people are living in dense, early populated areas, but these are towns which are 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 people strong. They are not really cities. There are not places where you could potentially provide the scale benefits for providing the six public utilities that I was talking of in any meaningful manner, but they are still not large places and they're not large places where some of these scale benefits would come in. So I think when we think about urbanization in India, it's not the same US or the China story where you have a large number of maybe a hundred or cities through which you will provide public utilities. I think this is an important distinction to keep in mind, especially as we talk about big numbers for smart cities. The other interesting aspect of cities in India is the fact that Indian cities are really puny. I just couldn't get any other word for it. They're just very, very small in size when it comes to cities across the world. A Mumbai, sorry, I'm still used to calling it Bombay. Mumbai's land area, if you go by official records, is only about 550 square kilometers that compares with 3 to 8 thousand square kilometers for London, Tokyo, New York, etc. So in a sense, we still live in very, very tightly packed cities and that is not a surprise, simply because I think we have thoroughly under-invested in our ability to move people across longer distances. Even in a small city like Mumbai, and by small, I mean geographically small, it still takes a lot of time for people to move from one place to another. And again, the point that we mentioned is that the reason people are coming into cities is that they find better jobs. If you make commute to jobs pretty long, people are forced to pack and live them closer. Hence, one of the corollaries of developing a smart city is to develop very smart transportation, fast and cheap transportation such that people could move longer distances. And if people could indeed move longer distances, you would have much better quality of life. The average house in India is about 80 square feet. The average per capita housing available to people is about 80 square feet. And I joke that human right requirements in the US for prisoners is 60 square feet. So to some extent, we are living in really very, very small apartments in India. And the reason for that is we are simply unable to commute over long distances. So we need to live very close to our work in terms of the distances that we would travel but still in terms of time, the amount of commute that we do is still very, very large. So one of the key aspects of how cities will potentially start to become smarter is how they begin to transport people over longer distances in that and how they begin to think of scale in a sense. One of the other things that I wanted to point out is across the world over the last century cities have lost density, meaningfully, which goes back to the point of saying the cities have expanded out dramatically, even as the numbers of the citizens in the cities have increased. And if India were to indeed see the trend of de densification and we start from a very high base of density, Indians will really need to rethink about the size and scale of Indians urbanization. Our numbers suggest that we would require anywhere upwards of five to 10 Mumbai is being created anywhere between 3000 to 5000 square kilometers of new area being created every year, as opposed to the 1000 to 2000 square kilometer number of the one Chicago year number that is typically what is spoken of. So I think in terms of scale, we really need to reenvision the scale that India is talking of in terms of the the size of urbanization that will happen. A quick point to someone who would worry about India's agriculture in that sense, India's urbanization today is less than 3% of India's geographical area. As we were discussing in the earlier panel, agriculture is almost 48% of India's land mass. So even if India's urbanization were to even double or triple from here in terms of land area, we would never even reach into double digit land area required for urbanization. So I think the thought debate that gets created as to is urbanization is a challenge to agriculture. I think we should just take clear of that and realize that there is there is still scope for cities to expand out meaningfully, which takes us back to the point of how do cities become smart. And I think for me, as a citizen and as someone who would think about urbanization, it goes back to the point about how do you use the scale benefits that come in from making of a city in making life much easier for people. And I go back to those six points, the Bijli, Sadak, Pani, Shikshasvasti, Suraksh and the reason I say that in Hindi is because these are catchphrases which are now beginning to get the attention of politicians in India. So whether it's power, water, roads, education, health and security, we should use in some sense the scale benefits that some of the cities could provide. And if you're able to use either technology to do that or much better quality of information that is now available to plan for some of these things, I think life could be much easier for citizens. They would spend a lot less of their time and energy and money in trying to live in a city and could genuinely enjoy the benefits of having come to cities from rural India. The challenge that India has faced in providing some of these basic services has been that the government has in effect taken on these responsibilities of providing some of these services but has meaningfully failed, at least in urban centers, to provide some of these utilities to people. And what that has done is it has imposed what I like to call a private cost of public failure. The fact that publicly we are not able to provide many of these things, people just internalize the cost. They create their own power in some cases, they rely on tanked water, they rely on their own ability to transport themselves rather than use public transport or they would go to private schools, etc. I am not recommending a nationalization of many of these things but all I'm saying is that these have created opportunities for people, for companies in India to provide some of these services and I think those are some of the growth opportunities that investors in some investors in some sense love. But they have not been able to create the scale benefits that urbanization could have created in India. And I think that is where a meaningful amount of discussion and debate and I think ideation could help from here. Our numbers seem to suggest that if we are going to provide people some of these utilities, etc. and provide much better quality housing and transport, India would require upwards of two to two and a half trillion dollars over the course of this one decade. And I think those are meaningfully large numbers for context India's GDP is broadly about two trillion dollars today. So we are looking at anywhere upwards of 10 percent of GDP being invested every year in the share act of urbanization in India. Those are large numbers. Those are numbers that I don't think the government currently has the fiscal budget or the mandate in some sense to be able to foot. So these would be interesting opportunities that would open up. I've listed down some ways in which the government could raise finances and there are ways in which potentially private companies could come in and begin to make advantages of the fact that there is there is a willingness to pay in people when they get better quality of products and services when it comes to urbanization. And I think that's the broad lee of the land as it stands with respect to urbanization. And as said I would want to educate myself as to how we will become smart from here. That's terrific. Thank you. Well a great scene setter on the numbers that are right the numbers that are wrong and the opportunity that exists through all that. So Catherine over to you. All right. A couple of slides. So when I think of cities I think of them really simply in terms of them being people and infrastructure because I work for fact knowledge builds infrastructure. But as far as cities really connects those to in new ways using the information technologies to improve lives. So that's really kind of what it's all about and then making sure you're set up to take advantage of that. So technology really is to provide real and tangible benefits to infrastructure to people and to the environment through a better, cheaper and more sustainable solution. And that's really what we're talking about here. But I think also we need to include the term resilient in terms of what we're thinking about because a infrastructure is a long term investment and B you know we're under a world with a lot of changing circumstances potential climate change impact. All kinds of disruptions sudden perhaps relocations or migrations of people or gradual that suddenly become much more of a problem than they were anticipated to be or present a lot of opportunities as well. So if we can challenge ourselves in the implementation of smart cities to provide resilient infrastructure to address things like water scarcity, sustainable design and construction, urban growth and electricity with the increasing demand that comes and then you know a lot of cities have the you know the official electricity consumers and then the unofficial electricity consumers and so they're trying to use technology to help in scheduling and making sure that brownouts are not frequent because of these irregularities we might say is a way that it can be used and applied to really make people's lives better. And so if we think about the global trends that are happening that they really do require a step change in the way we design and construct and operate systems and structures in order to benefit society for the long term and mega cities have to consider the cost and scale of disruption caused by things like energy system failures and how would we future proof urban energy systems and there's a lot of ways to do that in both the provisional electricity and the management of them. Is there something I have to push different? So in thinking about some of the mega trends and the way that that we can respond and what the opportunities are in smart city there's a lot of responsibilities and a lot of opportunities. And so looking at the different sectors and then the different pieces of the puzzle these are all ways that smart city technologies can improve the delivery of services can broaden the delivery of services and attract investment because it's face it nicer cities are places where then more people want to come and do businesses and invest so that that makes a difference as well and they really kind of touch on all aspects. And so we should be focusing on things that either make people's lives better or that are efficient and certainly cost effective. And when we think about cost effective too we need to really think about the long term. So a lot of smart cities technologies are things that help in the operations and maintenance phase which can be a real problem because if you spend all this money to invest in infrastructure and then you don't operate it well or maintain it then you sort of lost the value from that investment. Mention resiliency and really excuse me all of this to make people's lives better. There's no doubt that there are a lot of exciting opportunities and benefits in smart cities but before you get to that you have to do a lot of thought and a lot of planning and what cities sometimes lack is an understanding of the broader process needed to drive to lead them to the changes that can end to this fantastic technology driven end state. And so of course one of the most difficult challenges in that is really defining the vision of a smart city. So what does it mean in different contexts and certainly a mega city version and definition is going to be different than a population of five hundred thousand or a million and then having a coherent direction of where the city should go. This of course is made more difficult through the complexity of the political process and competing priorities and needs and there's always more ideas of the money. So then we need to make sure that we're investing smartly and in ways that really can start to generate some economic returns that can be cycled back into the program. And I think it helps if you've got a strong champion. So for these 100 cities programs I hope that each one of them you know will be led by a strong champion who gets the different departments united and that's always difficult to do governing at any level is to involve the different sectors in the different different departments because that's what smart cities is about it's about integrating a lot of the different disciplines and application of technologies in a way that not only puts it all together but then can use it and leverage it as as you're going along so that you get the most benefit out of it. It does no good to put fancy things in place and then let them fall apart. So these are currently require collaboration and a team approach which is not always easy to succeed and the champion needs to create accountable teams that are motivated to achieve success and I mentioned these things because for companies it's a lot easier to work with customers or cities or governments that have all of this together. And so when you do then you're not constantly changing direction you can provide the best advice and that you can implement things in the easiest way. And then another recommendation would really just be to start with small wins to generate momentum. Some easy places to start are things like smart water meters or smart street lights that direct traffic to prioritize public transportation for example. Those are easier to put into place they're not too complicated and they're really you know people can recognize of the benefits they derive from that and then you can sort of build from there. So just a couple of kind of little diagrams to sort of what are you know what are we talking about in a little more detail so you can start at the micro level at smart buildings because the more the smarter buildings can be in terms of reducing their energy demand or water demand or treatment of those issues or of water supply etc. Then you're having less overall demand when aggregated across the whole the whole city. So buildings making buildings smarter and working together is a really good start. Things like smart energy everything from interconnection standards with different distributed sources of energy and a lot of those can then be renewable. Smart telecommunications which is often kind of the backbone that puts it all together but those can be leveraged to do things again like to reduce energy and water use to provide better services and provide ways of communicating with the population about different services and availabilities and things to take advantage of and maybe distribute sometimes the load a little bit more smoothly instead of the peaks that can create you know the congestion problems and challenges for systems as well as for people and then smart transportation which were involved in a little bit more but you know again like reducing trip time with synchronized traffic lights and smart parking and public transit coordination and making this information more readily available so that people have more choices and the ability to use that information to make their lives better. So these smart cities are sort of this interplay between what government does on its side and then what people do on their side and then working together. And then of course things like smart water and wastewater and of course water is going to always be a big issue and will continue to be a bigger issue both on the supply side of clean water provision and then on the effluent side in terms of both wastewater and stormwater management and so things like using systems and sensors that can identify leaks because most municipal water systems are plagued by an abundance of leaks which results in all of the cost of cleaning and delivering the systems you know, a good portion of those are lost. So those can make a big difference as well. So for us as planners and upfront as well as then implementers of infrastructure so we're thinking about things in terms of these basic steps essentially. So collecting the data and in many countries and places that is a real difficult challenge. So sometimes you have to be a little more creative in your data search so using either international sources or old fashioned talking to people getting a sense of you know, how typical is this or what was it like in the past and then kind of cobbling things together a little bit. So it doesn't just because you don't have data from obvious sources doesn't mean you don't have data to use. And then communicating those information amongst each other and kind of verifying and validating and then crunching the data and making sense of that in order to do in order to do the planning that needs to be done. So our approach really we try to take a holistic approach and so we start from master planning is something that we can offer and building then plans and things in alliance with different vendors and the city itself in order to implement things. So there can be certain initiatives on its own but mostly it's really on the backbone of other things. So when you're creating water infrastructures or transportation infrastructures or energy infrastructures you're looking at what is the most cost effective and efficient and what need are you getting at in order to apply some smart cities technologies into the infrastructure and things that we're designing. So I'm going to talk about just a couple of examples in case studies. So I'm recently back from two years in Gabon which is a smallish country on the western coast of Africana equator. And one of the things that we did in Lennikkingat the city that is kind of not suddenly but recently grown from a couple of hundred thousand to nearing a million people and that's about half the population of the country. So of course that has been developed in a very chaotic and unplanned way as people come and just kind of settle in and build whatever they can. So thinking about ways to deal with that and that's a common problem for a lot of countries and so we looked at one neighborhood which is kind of the center of town and using smart technologies like a software called Infraworks that enables you with the GIS based program that enables you to layer upon information. So looking at the natural topography of the area which is Hilly and then using the boundary there of the watershed and thinking about things not so much as a political boundary but a natural systems boundary and then what kind of improvements can we make? So in terms of road developments then matching that need for infrastructure and roads with the provision of utilities and wastewater and stormwater all as a system and then what kind of things can we put into place in a smart city's way in a place that isn't so sophisticated and that doesn't have a lot of data and so what really makes the most sense. And so the good place to start really is public transit which is just being reborn there and so making that more attractive and convenient and easy and then other things in terms of water and wastewater planning and sensors. And then another one is using technology, soft technology which are less about information communications but things like the smart code which is a form-based code that focuses on communities around walkable and mixed use so that there's parks and schools and civic spaces all in the same neighborhood instead of just saying okay the city needs 5,000 housing units well how are you going to organize those housing units and how do you create it in a way that is smart and it makes sense for people and from an investment perspective. So the government can invest in the infrastructure and the private sector can invest in the commercial and the housing development and so and putting in the first community wastewater treatment system in that community and using smarter technologies to do that down to things like solar powered street lights you know with sensors and that can come on as needed as opposed to being on you know all of the time. So even kind of smaller and little things. Another example we talked about manufacturing and services in Saudi Arabia as a company developing phosphate production in the north. And so with phosphate as the core industry and then all of the peripheral industries that are going to develop that means that then you're going to create a new city in order to serve all of that. And so master planning that using all of these principles and thinking about all of the systems together all of the infrastructure that's needed together and using smart concepts in urban planning and all and then of course in that location extensive use of alternative energy and water reuse and smart technologies being part of that. But the whole purpose for that really is to diversify the economy and create jobs and boost the private sector involvement and investment. Another example is in the various economic cities that are being done in around different themes and areas. So one of them being the King Abdullah Economic City and focusing again on all the interaction and all of these technologies and a few more resources and available there as opposed to a developing country context. But it just shows how all of this can work together no matter what the context you're using. So I just wanted to mention that Bechtel is a member of the Smart Cities Council. So anybody really interested in that in this topic should look further to the Smart Cities Council was founded a couple of years ago and really as an advisor and as a market accelerator. So involving companies and cities and governmental entities to come together and kind of put some boundaries around the vision and the definition of Smart Cities and to advance them in a way that's really productive and the site provides all kinds of examples to of how Smart Cities are being implemented around the world in both developed countries and the developing world. And if they're working hand in hand now I understand with the USTDA to produce kind of a readiness guide with the government of India to address challenges that are being faced in terms of water and energy research, population growth, migration, pollution. So when you think about those some of those issues as your starting point then how can some of these Smart Cities technologies be used to help solve those problems? And then finally so a good starting point for governments in particular is the Smart Cities readiness guide. You can this is available for download on the internet and it's kind of a a bit of a checklist approach for our cities ready for it and what do they need to do to get ready to take the most advantage they can of some of these partnerships and technologies. And one of the things I've learned in the last several years especially is if you don't have a plan you know you don't really know where you're going and the more you have a plan then you can see whether proposals fit into your plan as opposed to just taking okay there's an opportunity here, there's an opportunity there, there's an opportunity there and then if they don't all come together then the scarce resource of money isn't being used to the advantage as it really could be. So I think tools like this are a really good place to start not only for cities but also for partners and potential partners with cities to understand a little bit about how to go about with a roadmap and a strategy that's all been vendor neutral guidance and so on but it's a really good tool. So in closing I'd just like to offer that I hope that the 100 Smart Cities Initiative is implemented in a way that results in real resilient and sustainable cities through smart deployment of technologies in an organized and collaborative program. And I'm sure that it will be. Thank you. Great, thank you. Thank you very much. So there's a million ways to make a city smart but I think a point you made early on which makes sure that it's data led decisions. You know, don't follow the cool, sexy thing but make sure that every step that you take on this especially as we talked about with funding is relatively limited. Deploy it where it's going to make the most impact. So now I'll turn it over to Denise, please. Thank you. So in my experience and I've worked on a number of smart cities projects across Africa and we have a very, very strong footprint in India and our team is busy engaging with India directly at the moment as well. My experience has been that there is no start and there is no end for a smart city. It's a journey, right? And with with smart cities, it's really about smart citizens and as long as the people that are coming together and pulling it together are evolving and growing, whether you've got 10 people in this city or you've got 20 billion in a city, they still have the same fundamental needs and desires as you and I do. The only difference is the fundamental infrastructure that surrounds them is going to be a little bit different. So I think at the starting point when we talk about smart cities, it needs to be citizen centric. You can't start with a we're going to make money with it or, you know, we are going to grow our geographical footprints, whatever it needs to be. If I get up in the morning and I pick up my smartphone, what do I want to do? If there's a problem, how do I? How am I enabled? How do I go about making it better? Because that's the starting point. The predicted trends are is that the power is passing from the state led governments down to provincial governments, down to local governments and then to cities. And that's anticipated and it maps the urbanization map that we've seen with the predicted trends to 2050, which just makes sense, right? So how does that actually work then? We need to start learning to do more with less. We are running out of our natural resources. So whether it's about whether it's about there's not enough water and we need to implement new technologies to measure the water, it's also about retaining water and how we can use water better and the filtration of that water, the same with electricity. South Africa and Africa is notorious at the moment for having brown arts and absolute blackouts, rolling blackouts at the moment and it's dreadful because South Africa produces the majority of electricity for the whole of the continent. It's a bit of a concern. So we have a number of solar wind farms that are cropping up and we're starting to look at alternative sources of energy and that's absolutely relevant. And if I have a look at what's happening with India at the moment, there's startups that also have identified gravity-based energy systems that are now coming into the cloud as well that are now looking to be exported to the rest of the world which I think is phenomenal. We also talk about cohesion and integration. The government, the people and private sector have to come together. It's not about, it is your responsibility and this is my responsibility and we're going to kind of come together. We all have to take equal ownership in terms of what needs to happen. And with that, we have to identify what the problem is and what are we going to do about it. Now, if we have a look at trends in emerging territories like the BRICS countries. It's a Deloitte report. Excuse me. And they've linked the cell phone usage. So what has happened is they've increased mid to low class individuals, roughly 10% and they've given them access to cell phone technology that they never previously had. And that directly quantifies to an increase in the GDP of 1.2% growth. And what that means is that the more people are connected, the more they have access to you, the more that they want to do. And it brings out the inner consumer. Now that in itself links back to the fact that once you have the connectivity, which is a fundamental underpinning criteria for a smart city, because you need that connectivity. Once you have that, where do the boundaries of that city stop? Where do they start? Because I consider my phone and I can access something in Algeria right now, depending on, I'm only restricted in terms of the technology that I have with my fingertips. Which is amazing, but it's also fairly daunting in its own rights because you've just, that ability allows me to cross multi-jurisdictions. And we start talking about the creepy issues around governance, around legislation. So I think when I think back to this morning session, there are a couple of points that resonated with me around trade, around trust. I think the words that we used this morning specifically were transparency, predictability. Secretary Novelli spoke about the legality. It all fundamentally comes down to trust. And the minute that the trust is enabled between one country and another, trade will flow naturally from that point. It must happen. So in my opinion, and understanding the respective smart cities engagements that we've worked on, the first thing that needs to be considered in a smart city or a smart citizen structure is what are you doing with smart governance? What is the legal and the regulatory framework that you're adopting? The fundamental principle is that information is shared through data. It's the breakdown of silos between the different areas, sharing it and being able to make data-driven decisions, the predictability and understanding the 360 degree view of the situation. Now all that data is kind of just randomly floating around in cyber space. It's sitting in someone's cloud some way. What is happening from a cyber security perspective on that? Is that protected? Is it meeting all the respective legislative requirements of all the folks that are going to be tapping into that? Now there are different data privacy laws between India, between the US, between Europe, et cetera. Who is protecting that? Who is safeguarding that? And who is ensuring that that data is not potentially getting into the wrong hands? Because that's not really a smart city then. Data is predicted to be the next natural resource out there. And absolutely, information is power. But when you share it, it's an abler on every sense. So if we have a look, in October of 2013, the UK Department of Business and Innovation did a survey across six cities. And those six cities, the survey was specifically focused on how they are delivering smart technologies. They're not smart cities in the truest sense where they have every single tenant of a smart city with smart banking, smart finance, smart litter, smart animals, et cetera. It was more about what have they done to uplift that community on some level. And taxation came up as a discussion point this morning. If you have a look, and it actually references it within the survey, in Chicago, one of the areas that was uncovered as a fringe benefit, if you will, was that there was an untapped economy in terms of trade of cash. There was no regulation on it. There were no taxes that were happening on it. And with the adoption of digital technology and trading now, there was an audit trail that was created and a whole new revenue stream from a taxation perspective that was never even tapped into. So that is one area from a revenue perspective that you can have a look at. Now with India, I think you have a lot of the cities, of the mega cities potentially. You have a lot of slums and you also have a lot of people that are rural and will continue to be rural. How do you enable them? How do you enable those individuals within the community if they're not living in the large cities? You need to take the technology to them. They need to be enabled. Now, whether that's that they're getting education through some cloud-based device, like with Google education, excuse me, with Google education, I beg your pardon, I'm getting a call, I apologize, with Google education, or you see other companies that are popping up startups across Africa, across India as well, where they're taking physical kiosks that have been developed, SMEs, that are actually taking them into the slums, into the townships, and folks can come to them and they can get there online, they can pay for the utilities online, they don't need to go all the way into the city. They can access their water, they can access cell phone, they can access friends and family. And they're uplifting the community because now all of a sudden, you can actually track what's happening with the community. You can track where the trade is. If there's an area where there's potential issues around crime, purely based on what's happening on the digital network at that space, you can actually track what is the interest in that area. And police forces can be deployed into that area to uplift it. When we talk about government planning, if you look at the city of Abu Dhabi in the UAE, they won an award a couple of years for a planning application from a geospatial perspective in terms of city planning so that they can erect their smart city's infrastructure around schooling. Some schools, depending on the subjects and depending on the focus areas, are better positioned in certain areas to others. Some communities would rather have a university-built focusing on mathematics and science subjects versus another one is more on veterinary science than they have different focus areas. Understanding the data from those schools, understanding where to put those schools, that in itself starts a sustainability model for tomorrow. It's those tenants, those thoughts that need to be considered when you start talking about a smart city and a smart person. But all of this needs to be regulated because how do you know that what you're doing is going in the right direction? How do you know that the data that you're getting is the correct data? How do you know that someone hasn't potentially tapped into that? How do you know that the skills that you need today that you think you need today aren't suddenly evolving into skills that are not even readily identifiable for tomorrow? If you just have a look at the number of careers that are available today that weren't even available 10 years ago, can you imagine what it's gonna look like in 10 years' time? As a society, we are all responsible individuals in our respective countries, but we're also all global citizens. If I just listen to all the different accents and all the different folks that have been speaking today in this room, we have a plethora of cultures sitting in this room because we all believe that this is relevant. We all have a passion for it. We understand the importance of it, and we all need to get in and make it work because it's the future of our planet. Well, that's a pretty important point to I think conclude your remarks on. You know, we talk about that safety is the key. I think any time that a business actually calls for regulation, you know the issue is quite serious because that doesn't often happen in this town in particular. So let me turn it over to Soprano from HP. Soprano, please. Thank you. Is the microphone working? I see a light on. No? Yeah. Great, thanks. And so before I started working there, I had a full head of hair. Yeah, jokes aside. Been working in Asia, did work in Fukushima after, and those areas in Japan after the earthquake was in Detroit last week, and you know, you begin to see patterns. And as I work in smart cities, and I lead, we don't call it smart cities, we call it future cities because we believe you never get there. You're always striving for a better tomorrow. There isn't one end state. But let me begin with five fundamental beliefs that drive everything that we do, and I'm gonna take you down a very practical and pragmatic approach because we are in this to actually deliver value to our customers. The first is that these cities are extraordinarily complex social systems. And we need to look at all the subcomponents and their interlinkages because otherwise it's like pushing a noodle. You just throw in a bit of technology and things do not work. Number two, we think of cities as a city, but in my opinion, there are actually four cities in a city. And we have to think of these as virtual. Think of it as a little two by two box. One is around economic affordability. I think Denise, you referred to it. There are people who are wealthy who can create an unflavorable world of their own. And then there are some who don't have it and who still live there. The second axis is density. You have really, really dense areas and you have low density areas. Completely different situations in terms of how you deliver services, asset utilization, the last mile delivery, et cetera. And you might find four worlds. These four worlds exist in every city that I've come across in the world. There may be some parts that are bigger. 24% of India's population live in slums. In one, ultra dense, not being able to afford. There are enclaves you go on Gurgaon. If you walk inside, you will find you're in world A. And if you walk outside, it's a different world. The question is how do we balance the needs of all four? The city has to cater to the needs of all four of these. Point number two. Point number three, the business model becomes extraordinarily important. It's these cities are all in a perfect storm. There's a lot of citizen expectations in terms of 24 by seven by 365 service. Akhilesh, you talked about the massive urbanization that is taking place. Just imagine the scale. Those numbers don't mean anything. The busiest airport on this planet is Atlanta. They get about 400 airplanes a day. Imagine 800 jumbo jets landing, each disgorging their passengers. They all come to the baggage counter, pick up their bags. The elderly, the young, the dead, the dying, to be born, et cetera. And they walk out. And not one single person ever returns to take a flight back. They stay there. And this is what's going to happen to our planet each and every day. No Saturdays, no Sundays, no Christmas holidays, nothing. It's going to happen for the foreseeable future. Why? Why are these cities getting to be have shifted? It's because of several factors. One, because the emergence of knowledge economies where the clustering effect of having people together, having businesses together, is driving greater value. So everybody wants to be together. And second is the cost of transportations have come down so that the initial bit of transportation pushing everybody outside, and now, again, the reverse with connectivity, with web, and the other forms of transportation, everybody wants to be in. Because the value creation happens when you have complexity and when you have density. So this pace is going to continue. But you need to do a lot of things differently. Fourth, technology is going to be a massive game changer, but it's not the only thing. Why we heard the statistics that you gave, Akhilesh? And I'm just giving you a rough back of the envelope estimates. India has 1.06 doctors per 1,000 people. The standard here is 3.2 in the Western world. India has about 1.1 beds per 1,000 people in some countries it's 4 to 6. Let's assume that you will not get even to that stage. Let's assume that in the next 25 years, we just get to the midpoint of these. You need over a million doctors. You need over a million schools, classrooms. You will need 500,000 hospital beds, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You can maybe throw money at the problem. You can create these. But it takes seven, eight, 10 years to get a doctor trained. So we have to create leverage. We cannot solve the old world problems the same way. So that leads us to the fifth thing that these cities and the resources need to be connected. We can't think of these cities in isolation. We have to create leverage because there aren't enough resources going around. And B, these cities have to be anchors so that they support the region, the tier 2, tier 3, tier 4 cities. Because without that, the more we update and upgrade and make these cities smarter, all you do is accelerate internal migration. And these cities can never cope. So five fundamental beliefs. So what do we come in with as the technology provider HP? So we are coming at it. And we've got projects that we've been doing. These are paying projects. This is not corporate social responsibility. This is where we make money at it. And I will start giving you some examples. So I'm going to follow some threads around here. So the first is taking a journey of driving a city and creating capacity and driving some outcomes. So for example, the work that we are doing in Northern England. A microcosm of the UK, about a million and a half people, but a significantly elderly population. The work that we are doing is actually identifying the most important segments in that population that need the care. Why? Because each case there, in terms of a foster child or what's called as a troubled family, takes 100,000 pounds a case. And what can we do to drive down the cost? It's not about the 3% that IT takes. What's about the 97%? And by working with the child and with the family, we find that 31 different agencies touch that one case. Eight different inspectors go there to take a look at the case. What can you do now to cut down on that? Do you need 31 agencies intervening? No, you don't. You can do it with maybe 17. Can four inspectors do the job? And therefore, you find you have 10, 12, 15% savings in operational budget. Why is that important? Because in all of these cities, if we can save money, that money could be repurposed to drive the business point you are making. So let me step back a bit with that one example to say, how do we look at cities? We look at cities in terms of six integrated dimensions. And you can't separate one out. The first is, we need to create livable cities because people today have a choice. If it's not livable, they are not going to go there. And what does livable mean? It means it's a safe city. It's a clean city in terms of water, power, environment, et cetera. And it's culture and vibrancy. Two very vibrance, very, very difficult concept to pin. What makes a city vibrant over another? So some of these dimensions. The second bit is that the city should drive the new economy. It should create new jobs. It should create the ability to retain jobs and also attract small businesses, medium. And you can have a whole plethora of, we have six dimensions under that, which says, what about the education, what about the infrastructure, what about connectivity, what about transport? Third, the city needs to be connected. It needs to be able to move people. It needs to be able to move goods. It needs to be able to move information. Fourth, it needs to have core services that enable everything else to happen. Education, health care, social services, the government services, trash removal, everything else. And two very important things that keep coming up over and over again when I speak to cities and their CIOs. One, how do we as cities drive agility in being able to respond to changes? B, how do we drive resilience? Being able to bounce back or manage events and shocks. And what we do is drill down and provide technology underpinnings to drive the outcomes. And as you mentioned, Denise, that at the end of it, it's about managing a few things. It's about managing places, the assets, and all the things that the city has. It's about managing things that the city owns, whether it's the railways, bogies, or the trash removal vehicles, or all the signals, et cetera. But it has two other dimensions. It's about managing resources so that it does it wisely. And in the middle of it, doing all of this, is the people dimension. Why should people care? What value do they get out of it? And that becomes the insight bit. So what I talked to you about in Norfolk is how are we helping identify the most at-risk populations to drive programs there? What we're doing is say, let's take Auckland. Let me do Auckland Transport. And it began as they were having passenger or pedestrian and car accidents. About 300 people actually having serious accidents and deaths in the city. And the question is, why? And part of it is traffic, huge urban support. Part of it was lots of bicyclists. Many of them tending to use carbon fiber bikes. The street sensors do not pick up carbon fiber bikes. They pick up metal bikes. And so a video infrastructure that does not carbon fiber but metal, video kind of detection to say what should happen. But that can give you, in terms of citizen safety, it can give you red light. It can give you all sorts of things that gets baked in. The work that we do in Belgium, for example, is fascinating because there the government has a policy. Brussels and all of London is that they will ask a citizen for a piece of information only one time. You don't have to fill five forms. You don't have to do everything else. And for privacy and other things, the information comes together only on an as needed basis. There's a body that actually validates that. And after the transaction, it breaks apart. What's the value of that? Farmers who used to apply for agricultural subsidy previously had to fill n number of forms. And it would take four weeks to process. Today, they get it in a matter of days. If a child goes to college, once the application is approved, the government sends them, based on this information coming together, what their eligibility for financial aid is, because it's put together where she's going to college, what her criteria is, what the parent situation is, and its service. And guess what? It's saving them 97 million euros a year in process elimination and just fundamental costs. So what we're trying to do is, at a certain level, create these foundational programs, because moving forward, we believe that we have to create for the cities, not just these cities, but the cities in India, the capacity to save money so that that money can be redeployed in making themselves smarter. There's no magic or a goal lying anywhere. I mean, it may come a bit from the government budget, but the cities have to figure this out. So what can we do to help that? Number two is, what are these foundational elements that you need to build on? Because without that, some of the subsequent programs don't work. Ask only once. A video platform, et cetera, because these are core things that you can build on. And these are open systems. You can plug and play, because we don't believe we have all the answers. We are in there as a journey. The third is packaging some of these and bringing them, because part of what we find the governments also have to change is their culture. It's not about technology. Yes, we've talked about government, but how do they change the organizational culture to drive innovation, to think differently, to think outside the box, to push the envelope about changing the procurement mechanisms, to create that ecosystem, bring in the customer in the room, because what we are designing in applications and offer is not us designing. It's that child in there designing the next set mobile application, because that's what's going to make it more effective. That's she, they're in the room. And in that, we are packaging what we do and how we do it and bringing it to governments, because that is such an essential part of making this change sticky and sustainable. So kind of given you a long, long window to answer in terms of what we're doing. And in the basis of that, obviously, is the entire HP portfolio that we do. We set up products and services in many places, but what we've chosen to do is, in terms of these large, complex transformations, work with only a few, because we don't have the bandwidth to do these kind of multi-year journeys with very many. So I want a few, maybe 15, 20 really good partners, cities to work with, because there's a lot of ground to be covered, lots of things to be learned that we need to leverage, because other cities can learn from this. So what we're putting together is a collaboration of these 10 or 12 cities where the cities can actually share information and learn from each other. We're setting up a center of excellence in Singapore, where the government is co-investing with us, so that we do city-scale applications that they want to make available to other cities in the region, or in the world saying, hey, take this. It's fine. It works. We've tested it. But you sitting in the audience, who are maybe from other companies, et cetera, what can I think US companies do to help? I think separate. One, obviously, is the innovation and technology, which I think is so essential. But it's not a straight lift and shift. It never works. It's a question of contextualizing to the needs of India. That's number one. I think what my peer companies, and we I'm sure we have, is I think we've managed some very large and complex transformation over multiple years. What we do outside of Los Angeles, we've been at it since 2002 and in version three, version four of that city. So how do we help take these cities through that journey? And fourth, third, is scale. Because one thing that India has is scale. It's not a city with 100,000 people. You're going to find cities with a lot of people. And so to be able to bring solutions that scale up and drive efficiency is, I think, what we, as the corporate sector, can bring to colleagues in India. And that's, honestly, that's what I'm all about here. Terrific, Soprano. Thank you for that. Please. Well, unfortunately, I have to be the timekeeper on this one. I think we could have listened to all four for another couple of hours. We've got about five minutes. So we've got time for a couple of really quick questions, knowing that we're up against this deadline of a certain individual from the Ministry of Finance coming in a little bit. So we want to make sure the next panel has time as well. But time for a couple of questions. Let's start in the back over there. Yep. And so your name, where you're from, and please, really quick questions here, because we want to cover a couple. My name is Tracy Denholm. I just moved back from working in India for two years. I started Deloitte in two weeks, actually. So nice to meet you. My question is there's this concept of Jugaad in India that seems like everyday populace already has the innovation culturally in them. What's the first step for the corporate world in convincing the Indian governments to get on board with that? May I take that? Yeah, please. Yeah. So I think it's a fantastic question. And I think there's a question of adaptability. So I'll give you an example to just kind of drive the point home. We do what's called as it's Jugaad on steroids. We do electronic health centers in India. We've got 44 of these now. It's to provide health care in places where they've never seen a doctor ever in their lives. And this is, what's Jugaad about it? Because it's a micro-hospital in a shipping container. Why is it in a shipping container? Because I can move it there, that infrastructure exists. And because no doctor wants to go there, I can connect it with a teaching hospital, et cetera. So 50,000 people have been to doctors. It has a micro-pharmacy. It has all of that. The question that Jugaad, you can take it to Jugaad too, is 400,000 people in India died in traffic accidents. Even though the pace, you can out walk a car in many of these places. Why does that happen? It's because you can't get that patient to the accident victim to the hospital in the golden hour. Are you going to be able to solve traffic in the short term? No. Can I put these micro-health centers every five kilometers as trauma centers in a city? I don't need too much land. All I need is this much. And I will save countless lives. That is the kind of Jugaad we need to be able to drive with the authorities in India to think outside the box, to be able to solve some of these problems. So I think that's the kind of culture we need to create. Yeah, we'll go a couple more over there. Hi. My name is Utsav Chakraborty and I'm an architect in this area. So I have worked in the Tyson's Corner Silver Line Renewable Master Plan project. So I have two questions. One is for Akhilesh. And my question is, what are the criteria that were considered when we selected the three cities that you mentioned if you could throw some light on it? I think the US government has to say that. I have no idea what they selected. OK, so somebody on the panel can. I think it was given to us by the Indian government, if I'm not mistaken. I think they sent it over and said these are the three. I think why is it especially after the split of the state? Because you do have to create a new capital. So certainly that's one. So there's a half answer. And my second question is addressed to Soprano. It has been experienced that in the past, mistakes are repeated again and again, whether it's the design of Chandigarh as a city or whether it is the new cities that are coming up in China, especially Shanghai, and the rapid urbanization and expansion that have happened. What are we going to use to make sure that such mistakes in infrastructural development are not repeated and sustainable cities are built? I think many of these, and it's a long, maybe we should meet outside and continue the discussion. I have an angry point of view. And it's shifting that we haven't had truly the design-centric thinking, which we've put the people or the communities in the center to design around them. Maybe it has been done in isolation. And so therefore, I mean, I lived in China till last year for three years. And you can drive, and you can see cities there with nobody living there. And it was the question that had happened in isolation without really thinking the needs of the community and why will people live there, et cetera. And I'll give you an answer. There was work in Mazdar City that was going on. I went there, and we were doing some work there. And I asked, OK, you're creating this brand new city, totally carbon-neutral, et cetera. You want 400,000 people to come and live here. Why will the children want to live there as well? Unless we think about those kinds of issues and we think about this community-centric, the citizen-centric, and everything that goes around it, we won't have any evolving. It's not a one-time plan that lives forever. These things are living. The cities will outlive 10 generations of us. It's going to be there 1,000 years from now. And I also just comment on that as well. We see that a lot in Africa as well, a lot of PPPs, charity organizations as well, coming into Africa and offering aid. And it's the same kind of concept. The intention, as you embark upon the project, is amazing, but the outcome isn't what it was intended for. And I think that any project that you embark upon, a capital project of this magnitude, you need to have that governance layer in there. You need to have a full results management office that is testing the performance of the requirements from the beginning right the way through. You need to be checkpointing at all points in time. Are the human capital requirements that you needed at point now on board? Have you got the right technology? Have you got the right infrastructure? Have the stakeholders involved? And where the financing coming from? Did you actually predict what you thought you were going to need? And is someone creating some level of up-to-date schedule on that basis? Have you got the right funding coming in? And if you haven't, what are you doing about it? And I think a lot of projects are unsuccessful because those governance requirements aren't necessarily even thought about at the beginning. And if they are, they're kind of loosely put on the side because it's more exciting and sexy to get it in. Well, we're going to have to wrap it up there. But hopefully this speaker will be able to stick around for part of the reception. There may be some follow-up questions. But Smart Cities isn't a thing. It means a lot of different things. There is no cookie cutter. Use data before you decide to do smart solutions. Capture data that you generate. Secure that data and make sure that it doesn't get into the wrong hands. And also, I think it came up a couple of times. Ultimately, it's not going to be a smart city. The connectivity that this engenders will create citizens that are actually connected far beyond their own city. And in fact, a smart city can become a hub for the region, but also connected citizens more globally. So I think there's some terrific themes here. And hopefully our friends in government that are going to lead the work in here, other companies, take this. And also, you can share these presentations and such with your colleagues. But thanks to the guests here for coming and sharing. I have a deck we should have, so feel free to share that. Yeah, terrific. We'll have on the website for the event. We'll put up the presentations as speakers allow, as well as the video from this. But please join me in thanking the group here.