Did pandemic hit hard on our ‘Smart Cities’?

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Four Indian urban communities – New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru – saw a huge drop in their rankings in the worldwide listing of smart cities that was topped by Singapore.

The Institute for Management Development (IMD), as a team with Singapore University for Technology and Design (SUTD), has delivered the 2020 Smart City Index, with key discoveries on how technology is assuming a part in the COVID-19 time.In the 2020 Smart City Index, Hyderabad was put at the 85th rank (67th in 2019), New Delhi at 86th position (down from 68 in 2019), Mumbai was at 93rd position (78th in 2019) and Bengaluru at 95th (79th in 2019).This can be credited to the harmful impact that the pandemic has had where the technological progress was not modern stating that Indian cities were not ready for the hit by the pandemic.

From all the 15 indicators that the respondents see as the priority area, all the four urban communities featured air contamination as the key regions that they felt their city expected to organize on. Urban communities like Bangalore and Mumbai contributed to road traffic while Delhi and Hyderabad lacked basic requirements.The 2020 Smart City Index (SCI) was topped by Singapore, Helsinki, and Zurich in the second and the third position, Auckland (fourth), Oslo (fifth), Copenhagen (sixth), Geneva (seventh), Taipei City (eighth), Amsterdam (ninth) and New York at the tenth spot. The Smart City Index describes “Smart City” as the urban set up that uses technology to intensify the benefits and lessen the inadequacies of urbanization.

The second release of the SCI positioned 109 urban communities globally by getting perceptions from randomly picked 120 occupants in every city.  These citizens from 109 cities were studied in April and May 2020 and posed inquiries on the technological arrangements of their city across five key territories: health and security, portability, activities, opportunities, and governance. Reflected in the current year’s rankings is that urban areas have regularly varying ways to deal with innovation as dealing with the pandemic has gotten progressively significant in nearby governmental issues.

IMD’s Professor Arturo Bris, who drove crafted by the positioning as the Director of the World Competitiveness Center at the Swiss management institute which is behind it expressed that “We can’t overlook the effect of COVID,”, those with better technology deal with the pandemic better. Brilliant urban communities are not the solution, yet technology helps. “Smart city areas closer to the top rankings appear to manage surprising difficulties of the overwhelming pandemic with a superior result,” commented Professor Heng Chee Chan, Chairperson of the Lee Kuan Yew Center for Innovative Cities at SUTD.