 "IBM to launch mobile app to report civic issues")
IBM is in talks with several urban local bodies and might launch the service across a few cities next month.
Accessible Way, developed by IBM’s research team, was tested in a pilot project at Sao Paulo in Brazil. Just like a regular mobile app, it can be downloaded from Google or Apple stores. Residents of a city can upload their grievances with the geographical positioning system, or GPS, code to spot the area. Users can also attach a photograph of the site on the application. The city authorities can access the registered grievances on a web-based dashboard and act upon them.
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“The benefit that the city authorities have with the use of this solution is that in a snap, without having to send any person of their crew out, they can geographically map all the issue by turning thousands of people on the streets into human sensors,” Prashant Pradhan, director, smarter planet solutions - South Asia/India at IBM, told Business Standard. “We are having conversations with urban local bodies and while not all of them are forthcoming, there are positive conversations with several. We plan to launch it in a month.”
In its current form, Accessible Way allows citizens to raise complaints relating to parking, sidewalks, pedestrian cross walks, curb ramps, street lighting, tactile paving, visual signalling, etc. Pradhan said IBM might look at localising the app for use in India.
IBM's mobile app is one of the many solutions that technology companies are looking to bring to India in view of the Centre’s smart city project. Under the project, the government plans to set up 100 technology-enabled smart cities across the country. Seeing this as a big business opportunity, many Indian and multinational technology companies have come forward and are talking to states on partnering them for implementing smart city solutions.
Besides companies, countries such as Japan, Germany, Sweden, Singapore, Israel, the US, the UK, Hong Kong and the Netherlands have also shown interest in building smart cities in India.
IBM had developed Accessible Way in early 2014, and has been working on launching it in India for several months now. Currently, the company is conducting stress tests on the application, considering the high penetration of smart phones in the country.
The company has installed a demo of the app at its lab in Delhi, where it has created a smart city environment, and has showcased it to several urban local bodies, Pradhan said. While the first reaction to the solution has been positive, it has not been launched so far as cities wish to prepare themselves enough to handle the volumes of grievances and concerns that could be raised by users.
To battle the high volumes of complaints anticipated in Indian cities, Pradhan said the data collected from the app could be prioritised with the use of analytics.
According to Pradhan, IBM is currently stress-testing the solution for Indian conditions. He said that the authorities will need to be ready with adequate manpower and resources to solve the problems when they are reported through the app.
“We want to make sure that when the launch happens, we have the capacities to cope with it. Also, the commissioners who we talk to understand that they need to be ready to pick this up and solve the problems. For taking action, they need a size of crew that for action planning and that is why the launch is taking a little bit of time,” he added.