Listening to the state government talk about the Kochi Smart City project, you would think it was the most amazing and original idea on the planet and coming close to fruition.
The truth is somewhat different. Name any major or minor metro throughout India and they seem to be hatching a smart/tech city and promising to make themselves the new Hyderabad or Bangalore. Original it is not. You do wonder where the companies and clients for these smart cities will come from.
Even more problematic for Kochi Smart City is the project’s reliance on their co-partner for funding – Dubai. Everybody is in denial about the problems of funding (including Dubai) but Dubai’s semi default on their bond payments reveal the abyss the state’s finances are staring into. Dubai still proclaims their commitment to the project but even Kerala’s aging first minister seems to have twigged about their financial state and this from a man who seems oblivious to the astonishing graft and corruption that permeate every layer of Kerala’s governance at present.
So will Kochi Smart City go ahead? Locals in Kochi are pretty disparaging and cynical, but then they have seen that even a bridge takes a decade to build. The problem for Kochi Smart City is that it grows more and more irrelevant the longer it takes to build.
For Dubai companies, the old days of ‘grand projets’ all over the world with other people’s money seem over.
In Ernakulam, what most companies would like now is an infrastructure that works and internet access that is reliable and fast so we can compete with the already build smart cities. Will Achanandurian champion that? Probably not! Back to sleep old man!
