A Smart City Plan employs ICT solutions in an urban development programme to manage the city’s assets. Rourkela has been shortlisted as one of the Smart Cities under Government of India’s Smart City Mission. This article highlights two mobile applications, one primarily G2C and the other G2G launched by Rourkela Municipal Corporation towards achieving objectives of the Smart City mission.
Rourkela, the steel city of Odisha, has been shortlisted as one of the Smart Cities under Government of India’s Smart City Mission. In its preparedness towards becoming a smart city, the Rourkela Municipal Corporation (RMC) of Od-isha has launched two mobile appli-cations; Smart Rourkela and Swachh Rourkela. It gives me immense pleasure to express that the Mobile APPs ‘Smart Rourkela’ and ‘Swachh Rourkela’ are the real m-Governance solutions for Smart City Rourkela. It helps the Municipal Administration to reach citizens and make the city clean SUDARSHAN CHAKRAVARTY, IAS Adm & Chairman, RMC
SMART ROURKELA The Smart Rourkela Mobile App is an m-Governance application with ‘Smart’ Solutions to keep the Rourkela city clean and establishing a sustain-able environment. The city provides many core infrastructures and a decent quality of life to its citizens. Smart Rourkela allows a citizen to lodge griev-ances and subsequently monitor their status. The App is also integrated with the Grievance Monitoring Applica-tion of RMC portal and facilitates the citizens to get its important informa-tion. The Smart Rourkela Mobile App fea-tures the following: • Citizen’s corner for Complaint / Grievance lodging, Helpline Num-bers, e-Mail ID of important offi-cials of RMC • Lodging of grievance and tracking its status • Upload photographs or documents • Through the Apps Helpline facil-ity, a citizen can easily reach the nearest Police Station, Hospitals, avail Ambulance, emergency elec-tricity, find the Blood banks and get necessary Tourist Information • City News, Events & Notices facil-itates to get News, track Events, Notices and Circulars • Maps facilitate route and path to all the locations in Rourkela • To find Government Offices, Tour-ist attraction sites, Local Banks, ATMs etc • Watch weather displays, local weather conditions • Tour Rourkela facilitates a general tour e-guide of Rourkela • Beautify RMC- Garbage found dumped at any of the places can be informed to the authority by taking photograph of the same and up-loading the image to reach RMC. This enables the authorities to take necessary immediate actions for removing the same and make the city clean
User Groups The important user groups of the App are the citizens of Rourkela, Rourkela Municipal Corporation and the tourist visitors. The App is Android based and can be accessed any time, any-where.
SWACHH ROURKELA Swachh Rourkela App has been devel-oped for expediting and streamlining the garbage collection and manage-ment of the city, which are the essen-tial aspects of Smart City Rourkela. This G2G service helps to make it eas-ier and faster for the sanitary officers involved in garbage management to provide their work status electronical-ly anywhere, anytime. The App also allows the Administrator or Commis-sioner to monitor the status of garbage collection. Using this App, the RMC officials (sanitary officers) associated with gar-bage cleaning operations can send re-ports to the RMC Administrator and Commissioner regarding daily clean-ing position of garbage collection sites. They can click and upload Geo-tagged and time stamped photographs of gar-bage collection sites, before and after the cleaning activity Situations such as vehicle breakdown, strike, accident etc., in which the garbage collection gets interrupted, are reported through this App. The App is beneficial for the following: • Garbage clearance with images, complaints and encroachment scan be processed for decision tak-ing • Regular garbage management by the RMC • The sanitary Officers along with citizens of Rourkela can take active part in the management of garbage and encroachment • The system helps in capturing the exact location or area of the gar-bage dump • Suggestions can be lodged through the App The RMC officials can access the Mo-bile App 24x7 using Android based smart phones anytime, anywhere.
Technology Used Operating System: Android Platform Integrated Development Environ-ment: Eclipse IDE Webpage Development: HTML, CSS, Java Script Programming Languages: JAVA Database: PostgreSQL
Scalability and Scope of Replication The portals have been deployed in Meghraj Cloud. Proper status moni-toring mechanism is provided to the citizens to enhance the App. The pro-cess of hosting in Google App Store and National Mobile App Store is un-derway. The system can be replicat-ed for other States for similar types of application. It has been developed for Android OS and the process is on for Windows OS and IOS develop-ment.