Maharasthra Inks Agreement With Cisco to Make Nagpur a Smart City

This MoU is for making Nagpur a smart and safe city with the help of modern technology and use of Internet to improve quality of life, a Chief Minister Office official said.

It envisages for effective and fast delivery of services like CCTV, intelligent transport system, integrated command and control, environmental monitoring, improved health services in coordination with Nagpur Municipal corporation, he added.

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who was in San Francisco on Thursday, met Cisco's executive vice president and chief development officer Pankaj Patel and discussed the presentation on design of smart Nagpur city.

US-based Cisco designs, manufactures, and sells networking equipment.

Speaking on the occasion, Fadnavis said, "Looking at the experiences of Cisco in Barcelona, I am sure this is a good beginning though challenges are different."

"I feel that smartness enhances the efficiency. When you enhance efficiency, things get delivered at right time and right cost and without any interventions. That's exactly what people want from government," he said.

"Creating this smart networking is a win-win situation for the government, for the community and for the society. We are looking forward for more cooperation for making entire Maharashtra smart," Fadnavis added.

Fadnavis, who is on a week-long visit to the US, also visited Google's headquarters at San Francisco and met the company's senior leadership with state Industry Minister Subhash Desai.

He showed interest in developing strategic relationship in the areas of Street View, access and Google education. In an hour-long meeting, product managers from Google demonstrated the use of various innovative technologies and products which can be useful in solving large-scale issues within the state.

As a next step, pilot projects in these areas will be initiated and for the same, Google is expected to send its team for a detailed meeting. In a series of meetings at San Francisco, Fadnavis held discussions with incubator promoters which included Sanjay Subhedar, founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures; venture capitalist Prakash Bhalerao, and Duncan Davidson of Bullpen Capital.

"The presence of large number of incubators is the fabric of San Francisco. The large entrepreneurial community here has further supported and developed startup environment", the CMO official said.

"India is growing very fast in terms of startups. In 2014 alone, over 800 new technology startups have begun their activity in country," the official said. These startups are useful for quality education, job creation, attracting investment, innovation, and improving knowledge, he added.

Addressing the Maharashtra Invest Roundtable at San Francisco, Fadnavis said the state has always been pioneer in the field of technology.

"Aurangabad, Nashik and Nagpur are attracting people from IT field. Maharashtra has highest penetration of mobile telephony, highest number of smartphones and its users are in the state," he said.

The Chief Minister further said that among the highlights of the new ITES policy is the integrated IT Township with a work culture which actually opens up a huge door, not only for investment, but for the technological innovation.

"We would like to tie up with the people in Silicon Valley for starting startups in Maharashtra," he added.

Fadnavis also discussed advance collaboration on establishment of security centre of excellence with Symantec.