 Thanks everybody for coming to the session on Unlocking India's Urban Code and we'll probably devote a large part of the discussion on the Smart Cities program in India. So before I start, our people, is everybody in the room aware of the Smart Cities program? Because I'm going to quiz you on it. No. Yeah, I heard Mr. Bajaj saying that any city with smart people in it is a smart city. Okay. We'll have a wide-ranging discussion. What we'll do is we'll start with some opening comments from the panelists. Then I have a bunch of questions and then we'll open the discussion out to the audience and hopefully all of you will participate. It's being web-streamed as well. Okay. So the Indian government announced the Smart Cities program in 2015-2016. It's a five-year mission covering 100 cities with 20 smart cities being chosen every year. These 100 cities will be distributed across all states and each state will have at least one smart city. For the first year of the challenge, states selected cities following a round of selection and the top 20 cities were selected by the government of India. Now obviously there's a financial incentive to this and that's what makes it attractive for the cities to participate, be selected as smart cities, besides obviously the tag of getting the smart cities themselves. Now to discuss all of this, we've got a wonderful panel. We've got Ajit Gulabchand who's the chairman, MD of HCC Infrastructure, but most importantly one of the people in India who's actually attempted a very serious urban experiment. We've got Pratik Agarwal who's the CEO of Sterlite Power, Amit Jain, the president of Uber India, and Jagdish Mitra who's the chief strategy officer of Tech Mahindra. So Jagdish, why don't we start with you, just a couple of opening comments on what you think about either urban smart cities, what role technology plays on all of this? Sure. I think, you know, first of all, without going into the definition of smart cities because I'm sure that can take more than an opening line of two minutes and has very different perspectives depending on what you're focusing on. So from a Tech Mahindra perspective, we do a lot of work around technology, but a Mahindra group overall, we have a view on smart cities and we're doing some work around it. I think it probably needs to be more thoughtful cities planning than smart cities. I think we'll get too smart. So my opening remarks are really about how do we create the thought process within the city to make sure we at least get the basics right, which to me is, you know, electricity which I'm sure Pratik will talk about, water, security and transportation. These are the four things and the common comment that I'll make because we do some technology work with the UK, US and others, cities as well, is that it's got to be a very different view in India than what the rest of the world is. So we'll have to learn and do things for India than what works elsewhere. Okay. I'll come back to you, but I'd also love to touch on this and maybe Ajith, you'll touch on this because we live in a country where people believe India lives in its villages. So urban almost comes as an afterthought to anybody when in fact actually the pace of urbanization is picking up dramatically and nobody's prepared for it. So hopefully we can come to that. But Pratik, a couple of, you know, two minutes worth of opening comments from you. So firstly, thank you for having me here. As I was walking around the conference yesterday, a few people, one of my friends came up to me and said Pratik, you're speaking on smart cities. So what are smart cities? And every time I came up with some creative definition of smart cities knowing very well that I didn't actually know what the real definition was. So I woke up this morning and I Googled it. And I found the definition of smart cities on the Indian website. And I'll read it out to you. It's just a couple of sentences, right? So smart cities focus on their most pressing needs and on the greatest opportunities to improve lives. In the approach to smart cities, the objective is to promote cities that provide core infrastructure and give decent quality of life to citizens. The four priorities are water, electricity, affordable housing, broadband connectivity, and environment, the five priorities, sorry. So that was, I just want to take your attention to two things. The point here is to improve lives and the point here is quality of life. The smartness of the city is a means to an end. And that end is improving lives and quality of life. And I'd like to argue today that India does not need a smart city program. India needs a mission to get these five things, water, electricity, affordable housing, connectivity, and environment on an agenda. And it needs economic incentives to get there. And once you create competition and economic incentives, then people use smartness, which is technology, etc., to achieve those five goals. So you don't need a mission as smart cities. These five things need to be the mission. And I'll just take a quick example of the success stories in India. We have an airline industry that is flourishing, that provides impeccable quality of service, some of them at an incredible price. And that didn't happen because there was a smart airline program from the government. That happened because a sector opened up, it allowed global capital to come in, and people to fight with each other to deliver quality of service to the Indian citizen. And I believe that's what we need in the delivery of electricity, water, broadband in India. Thank you. Again, maybe I can just ask you to just mull over this. But you see the problem is the Indian government can't let go of its instinct to plan. So there is no notion of providing the basic public goods and then letting the market play it out. But it wants to actually get in the way and plan things for the future, predict the future if you will. So if you could just think about that angle of that as well. Amit, obviously it was flagged that mobility and transportation is a big part of the whole smart city program. Or it should be a large part of it. So sitting at your perch at Uber, how do you view this? Yeah, thanks Ruben. I think as we think about smart cities and as you talked about Ruben urbanization, I think for us transportation, given that's the area that we're in, is absolutely a key critical of how we think about the future of smart cities. It didn't seem to be one of the five pillars, but I would add there's a six pillar if it wasn't, because we're absolutely passionate about how we think about transportation. We are sitting here in Delhi, we've got the dubious distinction of sitting here in one of the most polluted and congested cities in the world. As urbanization continues to increase, over the next several decades, there'll be over three billion people that'll move two cities across the world. How do we keep pace with our transportation infrastructure? And how do we provide mobility solutions that are better than where we are today? So we are at a point that we can only go up and how do we increase from here? As we think about some of the areas that I'll touch upon and focus upon, what do we do in today's infrastructure environment using technology of today to make a change today? We can talk about public infrastructure. We can talk about public transport. A lot of those things take planning. A lot of those things take time, tens of years, billions of dollars. What can we do with technology today? What can we do with the cars that we have today? Cars, as you look at it, is probably your second most expensive purchase after the house. It's utilized at 5%, sits in your home or sits at work, and makes our cities look like parking lots, and moves our cities like traffic jams. How do we use the assets today? How do we use the technology today to get more people in fewer cars? How do we have light sharing? How do we have the same assets today, but get more people light sharing for both commercial as well as private cars, and reduce the number of cars on the road, even if the number of rides increase, and using technology to do that? How do we use technology to get the signals back from the cars that we have to help our urban planners plan better? Where is traffic higher? Where are their potholes? Where are you jerking suddenly because there's something in front of you? How do you use that data back to help our urban planners plan better? And if we don't start doing it today, it's difficult to imagine what our cities will look like 10 years from now when they look like parking lots today. Perfect. Ajit. Either you can talk from your experience or just more general perspective on urbanization. Urbanization has been a fact of India for centuries or millennia. In fact, all civilizations have been centered around cities. Nobody has been centered around a village or some kind of farm. India had continued to ignore their cities because it created a romantic idea of a village, which was nothing but a filthy place of ignorance and poverty. But we created, romanticized it. And most of those who romanticized it lived in cities in comfortable places. And therefore, we continue to ignore. So when I saw this Smart City program launch and I was there at the beginning of it because of my involvement with having tried to create a city called La Vasa in the hills near Pune, I found that the Prime Minister most exciting in saying that we have ignored urbanization for the last, we should have started our process 30, 40 years ago. We're very late. So we must move to what he called a Shahari Bharat. Because you could say urban India. But in reality, what he meant is not just a country of villages, but a country of cities as well. And that because we are so late, we need to smarten it up to leapfrog in making, providing services to its citizens. In this, he explained what is smart in his language. What he meant to say was, is where the management of the cities understand what is required to make the lives of citizens easier and better and provide it before the citizens ask for it. This was his definition of smart. And therefore, if you notice the word smart, it has all the attributes that are told, but it doesn't have a definition that every city that gets this money will go exactly in a given way, which is what Planning Commission would have done. What it says is you have to smarten up. You choose how you wish to move, what you wish to do. But what was achieved biggest here was that the conversation changed. We suddenly started talking about cities. We started feeling cities are where the new jobs will have to be created. Cities are where innovation will take place, research will take place. Yes, cities are also places where maximum pollution will take place, but then there are green solutions to do this. So fundamentally, what has been launched in the smart cities program is not just a conversation, a focus will now be on cities. In doing that, and then leaving it open for the smart, broadly which way to approach left the cities. I think we have done very well. We have stood, and when we are talking about it, even sometimes when we are mocking it, what is this smart city program? What is going on? We're still discussing cities. Go back. Go back two years. We were never discussing cities. And that's one of the reasons my city got into difficulty with the government of India then is because of these attitudes. There's also one more feature of India that creates a huge problem for cities with all these gentlemen when they talked of how much you can improve the city for giving better services. Is that we are a democracy. We have a very well cut out idea of an institution called the central government or federal government. We have very good state governments that are there. And they all function in a federal setup quite effectively. Yet we do not have the last year of government, which is the local self-government. And wherever it exists, it is only notional. The mayors of this city are absolutely powerless. They are titular heads. And the power lies with the municipal commissioners appointed by the state government. So bad is the position of the mayor that after 9-11 when mayor Giuliani went around the world giving a talk on the cities, the mayor of Bombay was not even invited to the talk in Mumbai. So that much was the whole thing. And so we did have a strong institution, at least in the big cities, of mayors. Mayor Kaurji Jangir of Bombay did not agree with the government of India's decision then to have an Indian standard time. So during his tenure as mayor, the Bombay's Crawford market showed Bombay standard time. So that was the power of a mayor which was tolerated even though he was a native. And here is a mayor today who doesn't even get invited to a mayor's talk. So we have a serious problem here in creating a third tier of government, which doesn't go back to the state government for deciding whether it should build a road, a bridge, a sewage treatment plant, et cetera. So on one side, the hopeful attitude of having launched the conversation and brought city to the center of our discussion and improvement. And the other side, a lacuna that much as we may want to do this, we will need to also create a structural change in our constitution in order to bring about improvement in the city. So I'm really glad you brought up governance because I noticed that governance was the one piece that was missing in the conversation before. To the non-Indians in the room, just to quickly explain this to you, urbanization is a state subject, not a subject that's mandated at the federal government. So what happens is the consequences state chief ministers get to decide what gets done in cities. And so therefore, cities are seen mostly as revenue sources more than anything else because political power does not rest in the cities. They're colonies. They're colonies, effectively. So Ajit is right. Both of us are residents of Mumbai. But more than likely, neither of us knows even the name of the mayor of Mumbai. Perhaps you know Ajit. No, I get a WhatsApp problem. Oh, you get a WhatsApp? OK, so you know him. I don't. But let me just push you on this issue for a second. The reason why mayors don't get power is because no state-level politician wants competition from below. That's the central problem. How are you going to convince a chief minister to actually give up power so that a city can actually manage itself? Because the problem is the day Mumbai has an empowered mayor, that person becomes the most important politician in Maharashtra. So the way Prince Bismarck stopped octroy in Germany, he just did it one bright day. He passed a constitution. But who's your equivalent of the Prince Bismarck? You see, that's the problem. The way Prime Minister Modi has handled the Pakistan situation, I think you have a Prince Bismarck here. No, but he has no power because the government's a state subject. No, no, no. That is a constitutional amendment. Remember one thing. United States, the states came together to create a federal state. And they created the city governments too. India, the states were created by the union, then made into a federal state. So the union government can still create the third tier of government and enforce it upon the states. Yes, it will not work fully well to begin with, but that's the only way it can go forward. And the 72nd and 73rd amendments, 73rd and 74th amendments of the Constitution, lays down this. It just did not lay down the calendar or a schedule to do it. So they can push this in quickly. And I think if you start doing it now, you will get that. And I do not see how otherwise, a urban development department of a state, which is usually mostly led by chief minister, is ever going to do something to 200,000 cities in Maharashtra or any other place. And the new ones that we will require. For La Vasa, biggest question is, it's all private property. How are we going to govern it? Who's going to police it? Who's going to do so many things? These models are still to be created. And again, people forget the fact that some of the great leaders of India, Pandit Nehru, Sardar Patel, were all mayors. That was their political base. That's how they came to power. And we've forgotten this history as well. So let me just go to you, Jagdish, because Mahindra has actually built smart cities. What's your experience been like? I mean, what's the positives, what's the negatives? What are the general takeaways out there for the company? See, we started in this venture because we thought we had a few things to offer. Including our knowledge of some of the work that we do on the housing, which we could probably bring towards affordable. But affordable, again, is a very affordable... Yeah, affordable to whom is the question, yeah. So that's a question to ask. But we all make our definitions and move forward. So I'll take a case in point. We've done some setup development in Chennai. So obviously for us, what makes sense for us is to go further away from the city centre and build it because then you can afford to get the land going. We can build the houses and put projects which are sort of... And for us, it was important that we create the business centre as well. Because our idea was that we will create livelihood for those people so that the living and the livelihood and life, the three things that matter, start to happen there. And the challenge therefore became how do we handle transportation or mobility? And these are people. So we had to then work very closely, and I don't think we are 100% successful. But this is about how you do things in India and probably how things need to be working in India is that our people, our team started working with the railways. There's a nearby station to where we are. How do we add more coaches to it? Because if you move people here and they have to go work in the city or centre of Chennai and they don't get a place to stay, get inside the train, then it's not going to work out. So to me, I think, I would love to say technology and we were having this debate before this. The technology from a tech Mahindra perspective would solve all problems and we could transport it. But let me actually ask you that question because Ajit brought it up as well, which is the problem in the country is the lack of state capacity and especially on enforcement. So you can have all kinds of technological fixes but there's no state capacity to actually enforce anything. Now, one could make the argument that technology could be a reasonable proxy for the missing state. Is that the way, for instance, you would see it? I mean, what role can technology play here? Well, I think it can play a very significant role, especially in a lot of ways. Most of our challenges are that, you know, we cannot afford to put more people on the street, though I think cost of people in this country is cheaper to police. But who's going to police them? Then you have another layer to police them. So there's no end to that policing. So to me, I think technology is the only solution to keep monitoring and being able to use the data effectively. So we talked about garbage collection, for example. And if I were to put sensors on those garbage collecting vehicles, be able to tell whether the person actually visited it or not and take action on the person, the challenge is who's going to take that action? Right. Whether you're going to get into a problem with the... Because technology can't solve that problem. Technology can't solve that problem. Technology can give you data which is effective decision making, but can't take the decision for you. Pratik, you had sort of hinted on this as well when you said technology means not end. Right. I mean, do you want to just speak to this issue as well? Yeah, I mean, I have Mr. Jain sitting here and, you know, Uber has brought technology. If the government had said that only black and yellow cabs will exist in India and nothing else, then the matter ends over there. Right. They created economic incentives and therefore someone with a technological solution came and if five drivers turn out to be poor quality, someone will Uber, I'm sure, will lose his job. Sure. Who will lose their job if the garbage doesn't get collected in Mumbai? Who will lose their job if the broadband is bad? Who will lose their job if the electricity, load shedding and Gurgam is 10 hours? No one. So I have us, you know, I continue to say the same thing. Please bring economic incentives and competition in the delivery of basic utilities as has been done in the US, as has it been done in the UK, as has been done for transport in India. Right. You mean aviation? No, Uber. Oh, Uber, okay. Local transport, aviation. Even aviation. Even aviation. You know, we did a small experiment in Mumbai. We said that broadband is really bad in Mumbai. What if I connected 200,000 homes with the fiber optic network and offered that network to anyone to pump in broadband into that home and pay me a fee for it? That could create competition. I have eight subscribers, eight internet service providers fighting with each other, providing 50 gig 100 meg connections in those homes. While the neighbor next door, like one neighborhood away who didn't have that service dependent on MTNL is still getting two megs and he's out two hours a day. Right. I believe we have enough incidences to show that competition solves the problem. We just need to bring it to basic utilities. And you're right. It comes down to who will make that decision. It is the state government. It is the municipal corporation. But we need that change in a constitution, something that will make it. Because you need to unbundled and then privatize. Yes. I mean, yes. The Maharashtra government does use technology. Right. They're committed to it. They put CCTVs at that's buzz. For what reason, I mean? I don't know. Amit. So one of the central problem here is that the ability of regulation to keep up, and especially as technology sort of speeds up, right? The inability of regulation to keep up. And we've got former regulators in the room and hopefully they'll come in on the discussion as well. The economist Ajesh Shah, he wrote a memorable piece about Uber once about the fact that every regulator in India is obsessed about level playing fields. But you can get to level playing field either by pulling everybody down to mediocrity or pulling everybody up to excellence. And India, the response typically is to pull everybody down to mediocrity. And that's one of the problems that Uber itself has had to face. How do you view this regulatory conundrum where you are thinking up a scenario where when the regulators are dealing with problems of yesterday? Yes, let me address that in two parts, Ruben. The first part is kind of your point about technology and the pace of regulations. In most cases, technology will always be at a higher pace than regulations. That's always been the case for decades, for centuries, I'll give you an example. If you talk about when cars were first invented about 100 years back, the regulations at that time were that in front of a car, there's got to be a person walking with a flag to protect the horse and carriage industry. Those seem smart regulations at that time, obviously that didn't last for very long. As we look at our space as well, as we look at Uber in India, Uber across some of the other countries, in most countries, in fact, in all countries, regulations is following the innovation in technology. The innovation in technology will not stop. I think it's up to all companies like us and others, how do you bring regulators along? And how do you bring regulators along in a way that shows the benefit, in our case, again, to riders, to drivers, and to cities? It's not a short path, it's not an easy path, but that's the only way to get there. To wait for regulations to change before innovation happens is a much longer time period than making the change happen and bringing regulators along in a relatively shorter time span because something has happened that shows the benefits to a section of society. I think that was the first question. So I can repeat your second question again? Or the second part of the question? I mean, it was more a question of, the level playing field argument that regulators constantly use. So therefore, there is a Cali-Pili taxi, so I won't let me now bring you down to the level of the Cali-Pili. The instinct is to bring down rather than take up. Yeah, I think you could have said that better, right? And again, it is, and as we work with regulators, it is how do you get a level field, but not by imposing 10 extra conditions? And how do you de-regulate to the most extent, industry so it benefits everybody? I mean, take New York, for example, we had a medallion system where there was an artificial supply cap because a medallion costs a million dollars. So the number of cabs on the road that were in New York City today versus 40 years back was the same, was exactly the same because of the medallion system. Since Uber there, the cost of the medallion has come back, has come down by three fourths, if not more. Similar here, our conversation with the government and our urge the government is, let's not put onerous regulations that might have existed before, let's de-regulate and let's make it a level playing field for everybody. If you've got five regulations on supply caps, on price restrictions, on other areas that have not benefited or that are hurdles to the transportation industry today, how do you remove those barriers from the yellows? I'm curious, what's the pushback? It's not about pushback, it's about taking time to get different kind of regular... Stakeholders, I mean... Stakeholders, right? Transportation in our case, and you talked about this, is a state subject. Yeah. So there's one way which is, let's work with the central government to amend the constitution, to amend the Motor Vehicles Act. At the same time work with state regulators to say, okay, in the meantime, because transportation is a state subject, let's amend that. So it's more about pushback, it's about how do you get everybody in the same page? How do you get everybody in the same page that let's put some political instincts to the side, is this better for our cities? Is this what is needed for our cities? Is this better for our riders? Is this gonna reduce congestion and pollution? Is this gonna make transportation easier? And you'll have various people who will come on that argument day one. There'll be other people who'll take longer time. It's human nature. So while I have you on the spot, why don't you tell us a little bit about what are you guys doing at the cutting edge? And I don't mean in India. The last time I had a conversation with somebody at Uber, they were talking to me about autonomous flying vehicles. What's the bleeding edge for Uber right now? What are you guys thinking up? See, autonomous is happening in the US, but cutting edge, to me, cutting edge in India is as basic as ride-sharing in India. That is cutting edge in India today. Again, I'll go back to our Delhi example, right? 70% of the cars in the road in Delhi today have one passenger in the car. If you could change that tomorrow and say regulations allow ride-sharing, regulations allow somebody from going from their home to work to pick up another passenger on the way, and you've done all the necessary background checks, safety precautions, et cetera, can we reduce the number of cars on the road by 30%, 35% tomorrow? So it doesn't sound as fancy as autonomous, which is something we're doing in the US, but that is more than cutting edge today in what our cities need today. It's absolutely cutting edge. Okay, Ajit, on the governance issue, again, going back to it. I mean, with Lavaser, you've had some experience with this. One way to think about smart cities is there is an SPV now in place through which you could actually try some experiments. So for instance, you actually have an empowered CEO with a fixed term of five years, as opposed to a mayoral term of, so what's your view on that, using the smart city as a vehicle for experimentation? See, we had in a very peculiar situation. We are up in the hills, and we are dealing with 18 villages and some group of guys who have benefited so much by this development coming that they have to cooperate with us. Now, how do you create a management out of it, a managing city out of it, in terms of who will decide what is good for the city? Should it be the people that live there will vote and do it? How much of that should we vote? How much of that should we still manage privately with a contract? And then over a period of time, it will shift to like any normal city. These are issues that have still not begun any kind of conversation. I've started this dialogue with Delhi, in Delhi with them, that if you're going to build 100 new cities, if you have this city already under construction, why don't we look at the governance model for this? Because every day there is this problem, what is this, how do you provide security? One is provide private security, but then who will actually make an arrest? Right, who will? The way we have governed this so poor in the country, that when we asked for policemen to come there, they sent us after six weeks to policemen. So this kind of a thing, this is how they govern. This is how it is always happening. So you don't realize, when you really now see a larger population living here requires policing, that's when this whole thing comes home to you. These are things that need to be sorted. How much of this is a sovereign function that can be contracted out? For example, a lot of municipal functions can be caught. Sure, but enforcement is very hard to caught. Enforcement is very hard. Giving death certificates is very hard because you have to have crematoriums and burial grounds and everything in such a place. So there are many such issues that are there that are still waiting, and we have now raised this point that this needs to be tackled side by side too. The other side of the governance is that because there is no model of leaving the city to deal with itself, the state government officials don't understand what you're asking. As he said, these are new things we are doing. So we have to come up with new ideas to convince them how it helps. But do you have a model in mind for enforcement on the specific question of enforcement? No, we have several ideas in mind and they have to be discussed with everybody. Only thing we know is that the Indian constitution allows private cities to be run and a public-private partnership is allowed. Jamshedpur for a while was run like that. So I think there is a possibility of doing it, but nobody has seriously, because city is not important, the city has to be controlled. So it hasn't been done. It's a painful process of pointing out to them how this will help, how they themselves want more cities built, how this will be a model. This is there. It's called machete technology. You know the guys who go ahead and shungle cutting out the first guy. I'll leave that for the audience to ask you further questions on. Pratik, energy, right? I mean, urban is going to be the single largest consumer of electricity energy going forwards. Given all the concerns around sustainability and so on, how are you thinking about the whole issue of how does one bring down the per capita carbon footprint of urban residents? Besides the obvious, but as a utility, how do you think about it? I mean, obviously, Ahmed mentioned the transportation part of it, but as a energy producer, as an energy company, how do you think about it? So I look at it in two ways. There is the delivery aspect of it. Who will deliver energy? And then there is technology. I think technology has been covered in various forums yesterday, but I'll just quickly cover it once again. The combination of rooftop solar with storage, along with a smart grid, is going to take over most of urban world, whether it's five years, 10 years, whatever. Any of you been reading about what's happening in Hawaii right now? There is a major pushback because there is so much rooftop solar that people don't need the grid anymore. And this is without storage. Imagine what happens if there's storage and they can use it at night as well. They will simply surrender the grid and you've got the entire grid wondering, what do I do with myself as well as my generation? So I'm just curious. In Hawaii, how does the base load work? So what do they do without the storage, if it's all solar? No, so they're using it in the day at the moment and at night they're dependent on the grid. So the grid is still up in the air? Yeah, at night. So my point is that technology is going to come. You don't need anything. No one needs to do anything right now. Just wait for it to come. And the technology, and of course that will solve the 38,000, I think, megawatts of diesel generators in our country which contribute to carbon footprint. I think that that should solve a large part of it. But you still have, and you talk about enforcement, right? So when you say enforcement, maybe you ask a question that who's going to enforce that there is no load shedding in Gurgaon? It's not just load shedding, it's much more than that. I mean the guy who comes in and destroys your electricity meter, then asks a 20,000 bribe to reinstall your electricity meter. Agreed, agreed. So if the customer's satisfaction is important to one or two agencies, then that is when you remove that problem. No one cares about customer satisfaction because the municipal commissioner or whatever of Gurgaon or Mumbai, that's not his KRA or KPI. He doesn't get his dividends from that. So I come back to the same thing. It's been done around the world, unbundled the last mile. There is a bill in the parliament right now for content and cash separation. It requires a lot of political will as much as the GST. But if they can get that through, then you can have hundreds of supply licenses, mom and pop shops who are procuring one, two, three megawatts of power and supplying to small communities around the country and competing with each other. They're implementing time of day use. They're saying that, okay, I'm not just gonna supply to you, but if you have a lot of extra power because you have a large roof, I will give you the best price for it, better than him. And I will take that from you and give it to this textile mill outside the city. Got it. So I think it goes hand in hand. Environment and energy and this contractual method, all three together can definitely solve that problem. Okay, audience, I'm coming to you. This is my last question before I come to you. So get your questions ready. Jagdish, Mahindra has actually been at the forefront of affordable housing in general. I mean, and this is such a crucial element of cities and it doesn't really get talked about or the fact that it's about migrant workers coming into cities and housing them. What's your, I mean, what are the takeaways? I mean, if you had, I mean, in the provision of affordable housing, what stands in the way? Financing. Financing from whom? Financing to the people. So the, okay. So I think if there's one area that I think needs to be seriously looked at, we've done some work because we have a financing arm of our own which does rural financing, so they understand. How do you do a little bit of microfinance and figure that out? Just out of curiosity, do you do non-collateralized or collateralized? Collateralized. Collateralized. So which is the bigger challenge, right? So you need to move to a lot more non-collateralized based on data and transactions. And I'm hoping with the uptake of payment banks, with the uptake of being able to move from digital to, sorry, from cash to digital, we'll collect a whole lot of data, which countries like Philippines, et cetera, have done, by the way. And they're able to figure out from your telephone conversations, from your social media presence, whether they can do collateral, non-collateral based loans. So what we've done to a certain extent, and I don't think we've been 100% successful, is to be able to bring these financing players to come and work with these affordable housing. Because again, as I said, affordable to us is non-affordable to a lot of people. And therefore, how do I make that loan and that payment mechanism available for the guy to be able to afford that? So that to me is the biggest challenge for we can build 15 lakh, 20 lakh houses, but how do we get them there? Ajit, you wanted to come, but specifically if either of you could also address the issue of approvals. Because if you've got a high capital cost and approvals take 24 months. That is one part. But first of all, I have a slightly different take on the affordable housing. When you use the word affordable housing as you provide a concrete home to somebody, it is going to always have the question of what is really affordable. Affordable housing is only real affordable housing, is rental housing. I agree. If you have large floor space in Dices, which will then produce apartments and tenements that can be rented out at cheap rates, that's the only affordable. Because at that stage of life, nobody wants to actually buy a house. I agree. He wants to today live there. And nowadays, he may even not be permanently living there and decides to buy a house a little later when he can afford it better. At which stage, the lowest entry housing value, prices can come into question. But this is very important. Now today in Bombay, when you go back to Valladistit and all the buildings in Bombay, if you see before 1950 or 55, everybody except the very rich lived in rental housing from chief executives of companies down to labor. But Ajit, the problem is the rental yield right now is less than 2%. That is because you take it. Now if you see most buildings in Bombay were four or five stories. And if you see the footprint of that building is the same as the floor size. Now if that floor space index at that time was five, today to make it affordable, the floor space index at least should be 10, 15 in order to create the number of floors so that you can create apartments that can be given out at cheaper rent. What is it? Your slums are nothing but rental housing. Absolutely. Okay, on that note, go to the audience. Sandeep, can I just put you on the spot? Just on this call, in La Vasa when we tackle the problem, we found that we have to create a large area of what we call rental housing or social housing which is available from 300 rupees a month rent to 3000. Dometry housing, yeah. So Dometry to this all kind, yeah. So can I put you on this? Sandeep Parik here is a former regulator. So if you can just come in on the question of regulation and technology and then I'll open it out. Next. So I can see you put me on the spot because I slight retweeted you yesterday. I think you raised a very important point on why regulators behave the way they do. And I think there are at least three forces which come immediately to mind. One is of course a political force. The Uber model, you have auto guys, so they have more votes than the people, the consumers. So that's kind of a political problem. The second really is, apathy is always a regulator's best friend because if you don't do anything, if you don't build a metro, there won't be any questions asked. There's a lot of safety in the status quo. And we've seen that with SEBI, so many CBI inquiries after SEBI office. It's all downside, there's no upside. Exactly. And I think really the last point is this, I guess accountability, which I think you addressed already in terms of, there's really no accountability because of the structure we have of large cities which are not supposed to be this large. So I think these are three kind of key forces which are impediments to regulators and even governments, municipalities becoming accountable to governance issues, et cetera. I saw a hand up there. If you could just introduce yourself and keep it short because we're out, we're really running out of time quickly. So I'm Rajat from Hero Motor Cop. I think the issues with Indian cities is the money that gets raised from the cities doesn't get spent in cities, right? But that's political, yes. And the second is a lot of things are already hardwired. Like most Indian cities have 5% space for roads, Manhattan is 25%, 30%. What is the way around it? I think 10, 15 years back and probably Mr. Chandra Babu Naidu was thinking that he would set up, as you know in China, and Beijing and other cities are run like states. So the idea was to create at that time new Hyderabad, which would be run like a city state, raise money there, spend there, and you start from scratch. In fact, one of the reasons why Delhi had so much of infrastructure development was because once it became a state, the money got spent. She was the mayor, yeah. He was the mayor. So I think probably it's time now to revive some of those because otherwise if you try to make smart cities around the current cities where already a lot of degrees of freedom are not there, we won't go anywhere. And second, the money has to be spent, which is... But the problem is what we raised earlier, right? Which is, how do you create the incentives? So the creating a city state is not required. Whole of United States, New York. New York is part of New York state and Albany is its capital. So you can have big cities that are run. The independence to the cities to run themselves, as well as to raise revenue and keep the revenue, there is more important. And Delhi is a, state is a fiction. It's union territory. So a lot of money which is spent is central government money on the city. So it's a union territory. It's a very nice facade. It's called a state. That's what Kejriwal is finding out. It is not really a state. The issue is really giving them the independence to run. And I think that is lacking in the very idea of understanding it. How can you let the city run by itself? Like the state is allowed to be run by itself. It's something that they're yet not catching traction. Okay, why don't we take two questions together? You here and the gentleman there, if you can just ask your question. If you can just introduce yourself in a brief comment. Yeah, I'm Nitin Atrole from KPMG. I had a question actually for Mr. Gulabshan. You know, we've talked about there is no definition of smart city. It is, you know, what is relevant. Where do the residents come into this, you know, where is their input? And where are we building that expectation in terms of what that city must be or what it should look like? So cities are about people, not about the infrastructure. It seems to be very top-down. It must have independence, no? The city must have independence. We'll just take this question as well and I'll let you answer the question. Because if we say we are a democracy, it is government of the people, by the people for themselves. So their own capacity to take care of themselves actually and ensure that community policing, self-policing, self-discipline. You throw a banana peel on the road and blame the municipality. I mean, that kind of culture. I think clearly it is not sustainable. So somewhere we're building this model of smart city and functional cities and good cities. This element has to be captured, the government of the people by themselves and by themselves. And whatever else is needed to be done for that. I think Mr. Gulabshan brought that in. I think that has to be the focus. See, if you create cities and there is a mayor and there are people there, you're bringing governance closer to the citizen. I'll give you one example which tells you how it becomes important. I've invited many politicians around the world from prime ministers down to come and visit La Vasa. Every other politician quickly promised to do so, except the mayors, who said, I will have to see, justify my visit to La Vasa. Because every day he's out of the city, he has to answer. The next day he's walking on the street, he's asked, where did you go? You're having a jaunt. So the accountability also comes when the city is managed, because the citizen becomes closer to the management of the city. And that's where these issues come where the citizen starts having a bigger say to it. Today it is so remote. Does anyone else have a view on what the questions have asked? I mean, do you want to quickly respond to what Sandeep had mentioned on the regulation piece, or? I think, good. Okay. Any more questions? Yes, please. If you can keep it brief, it would be great. I'll try my best. So it's very simple. Next time we have a panel discussion like this, I would recommend we have somebody from the government also sitting there. Is there anybody here? That was recommendation number one. Yeah, so I think then it'll be, I would say a lesser intellectual time pass. I mean, because we needed to have their point of view. Second. What makes you think the government sitting on a panel like this will actually be honest with you? No, that's not the point. The point is fundamental. The point is that India's politicians get their votes from villages. Okay, that's where the money comes in from. 200 cities in the last election cycle were urban. Yes. 200 cities. But when you look at it. We're not with or nervous, but they lose or nervous. They will lose on urban. But when you look at a volume to volume, I don't think there is a debate where the votes comes from. No, but you can lose. You'd be surprised by the kind of research going on right now that actually goes into the classification story. But that may be a trend, but as on today, when you do a lot of... You're talking about us on today. As on today. There's world bank studies that there are agglomeration in DCs, there's all kinds of work being done today. So basically the point is... It's changing. Yeah, it is changing. Like I said, it's a trend. So my point is that it is important for us, this wonderful discussion needs to find its voice and be heard and not just be heard, but acted on. That was my comment. I'll tell you, somebody like Amitabh Kant, who like me was trying to create cities along the... D.M.I.C. D.M.I.C. Fred Corridor, is a great exponent of making this happen. And every platform of government, he has the biggest task of convincing his colleagues that this is necessary. So you do have some good exponents of this philosophy of allowing cities to be governed by themselves within the government. The thing is, it's not a small task to convince India to do things. The difference is the difference of power structure in Latin America is different. Anyone else want to comment? I just, I don't think this is about personally. I don't think there's got anything to do with cities. I think the whole point of getting... What are cities? Cities with more than X lakh population, a place with more than X lakh population is called a city. It doesn't mean a city has better infrastructure than a village in UP. I think this distinction of city and village has to go away in the next five years is meaningless. You get electricity, water, broadband, transport and environment to any place in the world. It could be a person with 10 families in the middle of Uttaranchal. That is a better place to live than Mumbai. At the same time, where there are theaters, where there's cinema, where there are restaurants, where there are other entertainment places, there are libraries, where all this also constitutes a city, which is not there in a village. With provision for cattle in basement two, three and four, they have their own radio stations as well. So that is a smart village. It's a smart city. It is a smart village, whatever definition. Tiny tahuk. I think just to conclude this, probably two key messages that we're probably hearing and to the point that we're saying, one, I think as a message of saying, break it down, make it privatized, I think that's a conversation that needs to be- On the services side. On the services side. And make it available so that there's, I think you made that point that, if you make it competitive and you make it privatized, I think you'll get a lot of good progress on this. And I think the second most important point, which is true for everything we do, is accountability. Who is accountable? And that, if that happens, I think technology can make that rest of the solutions happen. So these are probably two things. Any more questions? Okay, I was basically asked to sum up in five minutes what we heard during this panel, but I think I'll sum it up with just one line, which is we need to move the discussion away from smart cities to doing smart things in cities. And with that, we'll end this. It's a miracle in India. We have actually ended ahead of time. So thank you very much, panelists. Thank you, audience, for showing up. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.