By Imna Longchar
Dimapur (Nagaland), June 27: Nagaland’s state capital, Kohima is ranked 10th out of the 100 Smart Cities and certified as “Enabled” in the Data Maturity Assessment Framework (DMAF) 2.0.
This was announced by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) on June 25 during the 6th Anniversary Celebration of Smart City Mission, AMRUT and PMAY (Urban).
Kohima is the only Smart City in the Northeast to make it to the Top 10 and shares the 10th position with two other cities including Rajpur and Thane.
First position went to Surat while Pimpri Chinchwad and Bhopal were placed 2nd and third respectively.
The Smart Cities Mission launched the Data Smart Cities Strategy in February 2019, as a roadmap for harnessing the potential of data to address complex urban challenges across 100 Cities.
And to successfully implement this initiative, the DMAF was also launched to encourage cities to strengthen their data infrastructure and facilitate them in assessing their readiness and maturity on data. DMAF Cycle 2 was assessed based on the following 5 Pillars:
1. Policy: Existence of robust policy mechanisms in the city around data governance, empowerment, protection, collaboration and innovation.
2. People: Presence of empowered city officials with the capacity to guide the development of city data policies, manage data governance, drive inter-departmental and inter-agency data exchange and to build city data alliances.
3. Process: Effectiveness of the city’s processes around data collection, usage, management, security, privacy, empowerment, collaboration, and innovation.
4. Technology: Quality and robustness of the city’s information and communications technology infrastructure including digital platforms, sensors, IoT devices, data exchanges, big data and artificial intelligence.
5. Outcomes: Quality of outcomes around data driven governance, ease of living, ease of doing business, collaboration and innovation in the city.
Some of the initiatives undertaken by Kohima for this Framework are: Preparation of draft City Data Policy, Dedicated Open City Data Portal, Data analysis on critical datasets in sectors such as Water, Air, Mobility, Disaster, etc. appointment of Data-Coordinators in State Departments and few Civil Society Organisations, etc.
One critical and notable aspect for Kohima regarding the Process Pillar is that most of the data are with the individual departments, and therefore the forthcoming and willingness of departments to share data with Kohima Smart City is laudable and truly appreciated.
The continued proactive participation of various Departments and citizens will be necessary to make Kohima a truly “Connected” (Top Certification level) data Smart city.
Another Assessment of Cities regarding climate change preparedness was also released during the occasion.
In this, Kohima was rated 2 Stars out of maximum 5 Stars in the Climate Smart Cities Assessment Framework 2.0
