How to create smart cities-series of blogs

Leadership awareness alerts-Igniting the leadership in you   

Seeds of Smart City Solutions:

          It should have sustainability goals & should be prepared to adopt, improve, and innovate with convergence of technologies to provide services to its citizens & create a hassle free atmosphere for doing business & other related day to day activities. The city should be able to bench mark its performance through E-Governance & Convergence of technologies & smartness of its people. It should find ways of joining policies & working in a more cohesive & integrated manner across various domains like energy, mobility, ICT & Water Management etc.

          A smart city is also the one that harnesses its human capital and that has the citizens at the core, empowering with accountability and enabling them to co-create smart city solution.                                                                                                        For creating smart city solutions you need visionary leaders first,they are the one's who envision smart solutions by not exactly following the gudelines given by Government of India for making 100 identified cities smart and use their own creativity and innovative process to deliver effective results with least effort,resources and speed by following law of critical few.In modern times Lee Yuan Yew and Antara Marcus have done it for Singapore and Bogota.

This a real story of Antara Mokcus, the two times (Non consecutive terms 1995 and 2001, two separate tenure first in 1995 and the second in 2001) MAYOR of city of Bogota, Columbia. He is a son of Lithuanian immigrant settled in Bogota. He has post graduate and Doctoral degrees. He is a mathematician, philosopher and a politician.

                        He has the see different and be different thinking, which had its origins in out of box thinking, humor, clowning and eccentricity to change the culture of Bogota, which ultimately raised the level of behavior of Bogota citizens reflected in surprising but effective results. Bogota citizens trusted him as an honest and credible guy. His two tenures brought many improvements in city of Bogota through his unusual leadership approach. His image gave him opportunities to try novel methods to improve civic amenities and behavior change. He managed Bogota with extraordinary sense of awareness.

• He hired 20 mimes to control Bogota's chaotic traffic, finding that the move was effective; he hired another 400 mimes to manage the traffic. This out of box initiative reduced traffic fatalities by 50% in one year. The mimes used to ridicule and shame the traffic offenders individually, ridiculing he found was a better strategy than imposing fine.
• Launched a 3 day "Night for Women Program" and requested the male citizens to stay voluntarily (to avoid legal implications) at home with children. Nearly 700000 women had night outs during these three days, for women, the city sponsored free open air concerts, bars offered women only drinks and the city was managed by the women only police force.
• Did a TV appearance to personally demonstrate optimum use of water and while taking a shower, he shut off the tap, at the time of rubbing soap over his body. In the ensuing two months the water usage dropped by 14%. He also provided economic incentive for reducing water usage, which made an overall reduction of 40% less water usages compared to the one at the start of the campaign.
• Reduced the homicide rate by 70% by introducing 7000 strong community force and thus restricting the role of corrupt police force.
• He appealed Bogota citizens to voluntarily pay 10% additional tax and 63000 people responded to his appeal as a tribute to his credibility.
• Provided drinking water to 100% of the households and sewage facilities to 95% of the homes during his two tenures.
• He has exercised his moral will to order closure of bars by 1 AM to curb violence and excessive drinking.
• He initiated to make Bogota a green city with massive campaign for use of cycle by building infrastructure for cycling. Cycling now is the way of life in Bogota.
• He honored 150 best taxi drivers (on the recommendation of Bogota citizens) of Bogota, publically.
• He lamented that increased awareness empowers people and the awareness has to be demonstrated and liked so that people can experience and relate to it.                                                                                                                                                   Writeup based upon Leadership awareness book series Alchemy  of I,you,we and us(amazon.in n amazon.com -ebooks)