| | FEBRUARY 20199SMART CITIES ARE EXPECTED TO LEVERAGE INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES TO ENHANCE SERVICE LEVELS, CITIZEN WELL-BEING, SUSTAINABILITY, AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENThigh-speed internet services and to affordable devic-es. The adoption of public Wi-Fi hotspots strategical-ly placed throughout a city can offer reliable internet services to all residents. Smart cities are expected to transform the work environment by streamlining manual processes and giving employees greater op-portunities to reach their full potential, while also providing citizens with improved services.Every Smart City is expected to have Smart City Centre (SCC) (i.e., Integrated Command & Control Centre) and will function as a city's nervous system, where digital technologies will be integrated with social, physical, and environmental aspects of the city, to enable centralized monitoring and decision making. The SCC will play an important role in real time monitoring and expeditious incident response management in city operations.The aim of the Smart City mission is to create ur-ban areas that prioritie citizen's well-being, the econ-omy and the environment through the interpretation of `smartness'. As each city will be unique and will have different pain points, the focus will be on creat-ing smart solutions in the areas that cause particular headaches for citizens in the individual city, whether that is transport, connectivity or safety.Moreover, the growth of a smart city project can give way to massive opportunity, particularly when we talk about demand for affordable homes. Smart cities can also offer an excellent investment options with a sustainable scope for price appreciation, espe-cially for a long-term investment purview. The smart cities project will be an amalgamation of commer-cial & residential projects in India, in close quarters. Evolution of these smart cities will push the demand of office spaces, as well as hotels in addition to ser-vice apartments and shopping malls. The real estate sector contributes about six percent to India's GDP. With the vision of building 100 smart cities, many expect this share to increase to 10-12 percent by 2022. Thus, the developers will get a huge window of opportunity to offer new projects in the upcom-ing smart cities, which boost the regional, social, and economic infrastructure. Dr. Abhijit Sarkar
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