Data-driven decision-making in Indian Smart Cities: Promoting data culture, use cases and visualization

Abstract

India's Smart Cities Mission launched in 2015. The mission is an urban renewal and retrofitting program to develop 100 selected Smart Cities across the country. Its objective is to ensure the livability, economic-ability, and sustainability of cities. With the implementation of the mission, data started generating across Indian Smart Cities. So, to assess and maintain the quality of data, DataSmart Cities Strategy (DCS), Open Data Portal, Data Maturity Assessment Framework (DMAF), and City Data Policy (CDP) were introduced in 2019, along with several other initiatives. Data in itself can't do anything but data is a resource waiting to get leveraged. Data-driven decisions help support informed decisions, assist in setting departmental and city-level goals, serve as the base for effective policymaking, and help increase transparency and accountability. The research tries to understand the open data journey of Vancouver and Singapore and understands that India is at a very early stage. The study identifies possible pilot use cases and visualizations based on existing datasets. As the paper is ongoing research, further work will study the ease and difficulties faced by Chief Data Officers (CDOs) for encouraging data-driven decisions in respective cities through structured interview-based surveys. The interview will help identify challenges and built strategies for overcoming them.