MUMBAI: Calling for a bottom-up approach and not a top-down policy as of now, industry leaders have called for more and more engagement with citizens while designing and developing smart cities.

While underlining that each smart city is unique, L&T Construction chief marketing officer Joy Rajan Cheruvathoor argued that “each smart city is unique and a cookie cutter approach does not work to design them. The best way forward to achieve this is to engage the citizens better.”  ..

“While government spends hundreds of crores on infrastructure projects, there is no transparency in the way the money is deployed. Also, citizen-government dialogue is an essential element that can ensure that the right issues are tackled,” he said.

Speakers also cited cyber security as a pressing issue facing development of smart cities and called for fool-proofing the same.

Pointing out that there will be more than 500 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2030, Dina Tamimi, director of smart cities at

Honeywell India urged for swift adoption of technological changes.

According to her, the speed of technological change causes a potential threat for security breaches.

“Along with smart city development, it is important to develop tight security to keep up-to-date with the security challenges and changes,” she noted.

Abhishek Lodha, managing director of Lodha Group pointed out that Maharashtra has been in the forefront as far as urban development planning is concerned.”In the last five-seven years, Maharashtra has adopted several measures to speed up urban infrastructure development, like tweaking the urban township policy,” he said, adding while the city and the state is playing catch up, the rate of policy reforms is quick.