policybythenumbers: Smart Maps for Smart Cities: India’s $8 Billion+ Opportunity

Smart Maps for Smart Cities: India’s $8 Billion+ Opportunity

Monday, June 8, 2015

Gaurav Gupta is Dalberg's Regional Director for Asia.Did you know that India is expected to see the greatest migration to cities of any country in the world in the next three decades, with over 400 million new inhabitants moving into urban areas? To accommodate this influx of city dwellers, India’s urban infrastructure will have to grow, too.That growth has already begun. In the last six years alone, India’s road network has already expanded by one-quarter, while the number of total businesses increased by one-third.

To better understand how smart maps—citizen-centric maps that crowdsource, capture, and share a broad range of detailed data—can help India develop smarter and more efficient cities, our team at Dalberg Global Development Advisors worked with the Confederation of Indian Industry on a new study, Smart Maps for Smart Cities: India’s $8 Billion+ Opportunity. What we found was that even for a select set of use cases, smart maps can help India gain over USD $8 billion in savings and value, save 13,000 lives, and reduce one million metric tons of carbon emissions a year in cities alone. Their aggregate impact is likely to be several multiples higher.Our research shows that simple improvements in basic maps can lead to significant social impact: smart maps can also help businesses attract more consumers, increase foreign tourist spending and even help women feel safer.

In these quickly changing cityscapes, online tools like maps need to be especially dynamic, able to update faster and quickly expand coverage of local businesses in order to serve as highly useful tools for citizens. Yet today, most cities lack sophisticated online tools that make changing information, like road conditions and new businesses, easy to find online. Only 10-20% of the India’s businesses, for instance, are listed on online maps.So what will it take to continue developing smart maps to help power these cities? Our study shows that India will need to embrace a new policy framework that truly encourages scalable solutions and innovation by promoting crowdsourcing and creating a single accessible point of contact between government and the local mapping industry.

Policy by the Numbers

Smart Maps for Smart Cities: India’s $8 Billion+ Opportunity

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