UNSW, Sydney to help Pune become a 'smart and accessible city'

Pune: In a bid to plan a "smart and accessible city", the Pune Smart City Development Corporation Ltd. (PSCDCL) has partnered with University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney that would help the city fulfil its digital innovation agenda with big-data analytics.

Pune has already established itself as a leader in innovative and sustainable use of information and communications technology (ICT) for transforming governance and delivery of municipal services.

"UNSW takes pride in the cutting-edge and rigorous research work it undertakes. The university has forged strong collaborations with Australian government departments, as well as with countries abroad so that students can work on research with a real-life application approach. This Pune initiative furthers this endeavour," Amit Dasgupta, India Director, UNSW, said in a statement on Saturday.

In collaboration with the UNSW-Sydney, the corporation hosted a workshop titled "Planning Smart, Healthy and Accessible Cities" here on Friday.

UNSW Sydney has come together with PSCDCL to develop the city as a "Living Lab"' – to explore and equip Pune with an advanced smart-city infrastructure, replete with a set of toolkit, platform and models enabling the corporation and local public and private stakeholders to collaborate in a digital environment.

"Practical applications of the use of big-data analytics tools during the workshop would allow public policymakers to visualise and test possible future-city growth scenarios," said the university.

The feedback and lessons from the workshop would help development localised educational material and training modules focused on smart cities and big data.