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Santosh Kesavan, Crosslinks Foundation, India
People-centered economic transformation will play an important role in realizing inclusive and sustainable development in an increasingly urbanizing world. UN member states have therefore accorded a central place to “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” as Goal 11 on the “road to dignity” in the December Synthesis report of the Secretary-General on the post-2015 sustainable development agenda [1]. According to UN-Habitat, the UN agency for human settlements, around 33% of the urban population in the developing world in 2012 were living in slums.
Urbanization in most low-income and lower-middle-income developing countries has been characterized by environmental degradation, deepening economic divide and rampant proliferation of slum settlements. Slum dwellers have a poor quality of life and are deprived of access to basic services in the area of water and sanitation, electric power, street lights, healthcare and education [2]. Slum settlements have also been reported to have become breeding grounds for criminal incidents and other unlawful activities thus jeopardizing public safety in the neighborhood [3]. Urban slum dwellers suffer from a persistent digital and financial exclusion that prevents the fruits of larger economic growth from truly percolating to them. Recent developments in the area of “smart cities” offer a great opportunity to renew focus on the neglected urban poor.
For example, Government of India has recently embarked on an ambitious multi-year program to create 100 smart cities with an investment of over USD 1 Billion every year. The proposed initiative aims to harness the power of technology to create profound changes in how cities operate and to deliver more effective governance to its residents. As the smart city program has a strong focus on increased competitiveness and economic growth through technology-driven urban improvements, the challenges faced by slum settlements too can be appropriately integrated right at the specifications stage. The National Optical Fiber Network (NOFN) is Government of India’s largest nation-wide optical network initiative that aims to extend broadband connectivity to 600 million rural citizens of India by 2017 [4]. NOFN is realized by using the 2.5 lac village offices as last-mile concentrators of Internet traffic from neighboring villages before further transportation to state service centers. A similar connectivity template may be used in an urban context by setting up multipurpose “slum service centers” that communicate with a central municipal office of the city. There is a need to reimagine conventional broadband and mobile technologies to address the empowerment needs of the urban poor.
Uni-Fi Architecture: Uni-Fi is a universal and cost-effective broadband network that is geared towards advancing the needs of slum settlements in Indian cities through superior service provisioning, improved governanc