Bhubaneswar: The Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited (BSCL) won the prestigious Smart City Empowering India Awards -2020.
Union Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Singh Puri gave the away the award to BSCL in a glittering function in New Delhi for the innovative “Mu Saviour’’ application to manage urban flooding across the city.
“Mu Saviour’’ is an information communication technology (ICT) based solution, which will help in curbing urban flooding in future. This app, which was piloted in Nayapalli and Shatabdi Nagar in December last year by BSCL and Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation in partnership with German Development Cooperation (GIZ) using co-creation methodology by involving citizens of the pilot area.
“Mu Savior” app will help citizens in minimising the impact of urban flooding in vulnerable locations across the city. The digital solution consists of a volunteer app called “Mu Savior” which will allow citizens to report about the current status of identified critical points in drains. The app will collect three information from citizens i.e. is there any garbage in drains, what is the water level and what about the water flow in drains.These information will go to analytical system directly, where it will get analyzed along with pre-existing static information such as vulnerability map of the project area, drainage type, and capacity, land use type, number of populations staying in the locality, etc. based on this information the analytical system will send notification to city officials with a priority list on real-time basis.
Therefore, using that list the city officials can act accordingly and keep drains clean to reduce the impact of urban flooding. It can be noted here that the major causes of such incidents were mostly obstructions in drains due to the direct disposal of solid waste in the drainage network, which gets exaggerated during monsoon due to the high volume of runoff water. Therefore, to keep the city unflooded and reduce the impact of urban flood it is very important to continuously monitor our drains and keep it maintained so that, during rains, drains can accommodate extra volume runoff water.
How “Mu Saviour” Works?
Bhubaneswar in the past has faced urban flooding causing lots of materialistic damage and trauma to the citizens. “Mu Saviour” will crowd source real time status of drains in the city. The user interface is intuitive and citizens have to just select the image similar to the real image of the drain. The algorithm at the backend of the system ensures that based on the selected image and the GIS-based locations alerts are shared with BMC for clearing the drain to avoid any situation of urban flooding.
Awards for BSCL
With this Smart City Empowering India Awards -2020 BSCL has received a bouquet of many prestigious awards after being selected as the Best Smart City Proposal (SCP) by the Smart City Mission as the city presented the SCP with child-friendly philosophy among 100 participants in 2016. Among the distinguished awards BSCL has so far won Planning Excellence Merit Award by Canadian Institute of Planners in 2017, Planning Excellence Award by American Planning Association in 2017, Smart City Expo World Congress finalist in Barcelona, Best Practices Award by HUDCO in 2017-’18, Smart City Expo India Award Jaipur in 2018 for Socially Smart Bhubaneswar Project, Leadership Award 2019, Geospatial Excellence Award, CITIIS Challenge Award for B-Active project and Digital Innovator Award for Common Payment Card.
