The smart cities mission will require a substantial investment in information and communication technologies (ICT). This will account for 10-15 percent of the total mission outlay and will translate into $30 billion to $40 billion of business opportunity for the ICT industry, Nasscom president R Chandrashekhar said on Wednesday.

These figures are part of an integrated ICT and geospatial technology framework for smart cities mission report to be released by the industry body at the smart cities expo in Delhi on May 21.

As the population pressure on cities is growing threefold, the ICT integration will lead to reduction in waste, shorter response time in service delivery, increase in efficiency, Chandrashekhar said. It is only through ICT that cities can keep pace with increasing population pressure, he said.

The framework, prepared with the help of Accenture, association for geospatial industries (AGI) and Orkash, will be a handy guide for local governments on ICT integration. The framework defines and assesses the core of each sub system of a potential smart city, identifies ICT governance interventions, organizational requirements, and capability development needs at city levels.

It will also ensure standards, interoperability and integration with existing application, Chandrashekhar said.

The framework recommends, among other things, possible funding mechanism and procurement strategies. One of the ways of fund raising is to automate tax collection process. Past experiences have shown that the ICT integration has helped municipal corporations in increasing the property tax collection by three to four times, he said. The local bodies could also turn to debt market and equity investment.
Public private partnership is another key way to meet the funding requirements.

The ICT could also help local bodies build a performance management framework which could also provide a dashboard view on service, economic, social and environmental performance. The information dashboards could be created for local, state and central governments.